• http://opendefinition.org/1.0/Francais

If you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please get in touch on our discuss list, or at info (at) the OKF’s domain name.

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• http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/open-development

As you may have seen we had a session on Open Knowledge for Development at OKCon 2009. There was also discussion of the value of sharing knowledge for development at the 5th Communia Workshop - particularly from Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski of the World Food Programme and Richard Owens of WIPO.

We encourage you to join - whether you’re interested in:

• visually representing development related open data (a la OKF Advisory Board member Hans Rosling)
• sharing development information or making it easier to find and re-use (a la Aidinfo or PublishWhatYouFund)
• sharing practical information for development, e.g. on sanitation or construction (a la Appropedia or Akvo)
• open textbooks and open resources for education in developing countries
• or in any other open knowledge thats related to development!

Also please consider passing this on to relevant colleagues:

• Short URL for this post: http://ur1.ca/50fr
• Identi.ca post: http://identi.ca/notice/4786130
• Twitter post: http://twitter.com/okfn/status/1991186271

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The US governments new data.gov site (which we blogged about last month) is now live!

There are currently a selection of core datasets available - from information about World Copper Smelters to results from the Residential Energy Consumption Survey. Raw data is available in XML, Text/CSV, KML/KMZ, Feeds, XLS, or ESRI Shapefile formats. As well as exploring and downloading the data that is available you can also suggest datasets that you’d like to be added!

From the site:

As a priority Open Government Initiative for President Obama’s administration, Data.gov increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the Federal Government. Data.gov provides descriptions of the Federal datasets (metadata), information about how to access the datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets. The data catalogs will continue to grow as datasets are added. Federal, Executive Branch data are included in the first version of Data.gov.

Data.gov is a major milestone in the Obama administration’s Open Government Initiative. To mark the occasion, Sunlight Labs, Google, O’Reilly Media, and TechWeb have launched Apps for America 2 - inviting proposals for open source mashups, visualisations or other innovative re-uses of material from data.gov.

You can watch a video of Vivek Kundra, the US’s CIO, talking about data.gov on YouTube.

Great news for open government data - and open data in general!

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We’re pleased to announce that slides, audio and photos from OKCon 2009 are now available at:

• http://okfn.org/okcon/2009/after

Speakers included:

• Mark Charmer, AKVO
• Vinay Gupta, Appropedia
• Simon Parrish, Aidinfo + Karin Christiansen, PublishWhatYouFund
• Tom Scott, BBC
• Jeni Tennison, London Gazette + RDFa
• Leigh Dodds, Talis
• David Bollier, OnTheCommons + Author of Viral Spiral

If you have any pictures, notes, slides, and so on, or if you’ve blogged about the event, please email us at info [at] okfn [dot] org and we’ll post a link!

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The Community College Open Textbook Project, California Digital Marketplace, and the Open Knowledge Foundation invite those with an interest in open textbooks to a meeting on Wednesday, May 20th at 1330-1530 pm PDT (2130-2330 GMT or 2230-0030 CET).

The meeting will be primarly focused on metadata, tagging, interoperability issues, and repository efforts for open textbooks.

If you are in California, you can attend in person at the Foothil College Campus - otherwise you can participate virtually. Further details, including how to participate and an agenda, can be found on the wiki at:

• http://wiki.okfn.org/opentextbooks/3

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Yesterday Cornell University University Library announced that it will ‘remove all restrictions’ on digital reproductions of public domain works, meaning these are open as in opendefinition.org.

From the press release:

ITHACA, N.Y. (May 11, 2009) – In a dramatic change of practice, Cornell University Library has announced it will no longer require its users to seek permission to publish public domain items duplicated from its collections. Instead, users may now use reproductions of public domain works made for them by the Library or available via Web sites, without seeking any further permission.

The Library, as the producer of digital reproductions made from its collections, has in the past licensed the use of those reproductions. Individuals and corporations that failed to secure permission to repurpose these reproductions violated their agreement with the Library. “The threat of legal action, however,” noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, “does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates. We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks.”

The immediate impetus for the new policy is Cornell’s donation of more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive (details at www.archive.org/details/cornell).

“Imposing legally binding restrictions on these digital files would have been very difficult and in a way contrary to our broad support of open access principles,” said Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. “It seemed better just to acknowledge their public domain status and make them freely usable for any purpose. And since it doesn’t make sense to have different rules for material that is reproduced at the request of patrons, we have removed permission obligations from public domain works.”

Institutional restrictions on the use of public domain work, sometimes labeled “copyfraud,” have been the subject of much scholarly criticism. The Cornell initiative goes further than many other recent attempts to open access to public domain material by removing restrictions on both commercial and non-commercial use. Users of the public domain works are still expected to determine on their own that works are in the public domain where they live. They also must respect non-copyright rights, such as the rights of privacy, publicity, and trademark. The Library will continue to charge service fees associated with the reproduction of analog material or the provision of versions of files different than what is freely available on the Web. All library Web sites will be updated to reflect this new policy during 2009.

The new Cornell policy can be found at cdl.library.cornell.edu/guidelines.html.

It is exciting news that a major University Library is taking a stance to ensure their digital reproductions of public domain works are explicitly open. We hope that other libraries, archives and cultural heritage institutions consider following suit - to keep the public domain in the public domain, as per the policy recommendation here:

Keep the public domain in the public domain. Encourage publicly funded cultural heritage institutions to allow digital copies of their holdings to be re-used by the public.

(Spotted by Peter Suber and Cory Doctorow!)

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Last week was the first European Open Data Summit in Brussels (which we blogged about here) organised by EU Transparency, who created farmsubsidy.org. The event brought together journalists, researchers, civic hackers, and representatives from European institutions for two days of documenting and building on documents and datasets from European institutions and member states.

At the press briefing, Farm Subsidy announced their compilation and analysis of material regarding the Common Agricultural policy - which received coverage on the front page of the International Herald Tribune and in the New York Times. The cleaned up data will be published in full in the near future. The event was attended by a representative of Vice-President of the European Commission, Siim Kallas, who was today honoured for his commitment to openness by the European Information Association.

We had a presentation from Sara Hagemann of Votewatch.eu which was launched today (see here and here). The new service is a bit like Publicwhip or mySociety’s TheyWorkForYou, aiming to provide:

detailed information about parliamentarians’ voting records and formal political activities – from committee work to parliamentary reports – and includes easy-to-access information on the political coalitions that are formed around policy issues.

Unfortunately from their disclaimer it doesn’t look like their code or content is open - but we hope they consider using an open license so others are free to build on their work with new features to help the public to understand and explore what goes on in the European Parliament.

I presented our work on the European Open Data Inventory, which currently includes nearly 150 packages. You can see these under the ‘eutransparency’ tag on CKAN:

• http://ckan.net/tag/read/eutransparency

For each package we looked for legal information and whether or not items could be downloaded in bulk - providing direct download links where possible. Data includes everything from budget information to statistics to postcode databases. Material that was identified as particularly ripe for re-use included:

• EU Financial Transparency System
  • “The names of the beneficiaries ofthe €10 billion or so of grants and other forms of support, awarded (in budgetary terms: “committed”) by the Commission every year..”
• European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound)
  • Data from the Quality of Life Surveys from 2005 and 2007
• EU emission trading scheme (ETS) data
  • “…aggregated data by country, by sector and by year on the verified emissions, allowances and surrendered units of the more than 12000 installations covered by the EU emission trading scheme”
• Eurostat
  • Over 4000 datasets on a wide variety of topics.
• European Pollutant Emission Register
  • “… gives you access to information on the annual emissions of approx. 9,200 industrial facilities in the 15 Member States of the EU as well as Norway and Hungary mostly for the year 2001 and approx. 12,000 facilities in the 25 Member States of the EU and Norway for the year 2004. “
• European Environment Agency (EEA) - Core Set of Indicators (CSI) Datasets
  • “Indicators about Europe’s environment”

During the Summit we added several more packages and drilled down into some that were already listed. We explored material published on beneficiaries of the EU Cohesion Fund. Currently material is linked to via an image map of the member states and then regions within those states - so we used Julian Todd’s Codewiki to collate the links into a single list. While some member states publish material as a single machine readable file (France is a good example of this) - many publish information in PDF on a variety of websites for different regional authorities (such as the UK), which have to be scraped before the data can be readily re-used or compared to information from other member states.

If you know of any datasets from European institutions or member states, we hope you consider adding them to CKAN!

For more information you can see:

• Analysis presented at today’s press conference in Brussels - from Farm Subsidy
• Write up from Wobbing.be
• Remarks spoken on behalf of Vice-President Siim Kallas (by Kristian Schmidt, Deputy Head of Cabinet)
• Some photos on Flickr
• Blog post from Julian Todd
• Blog post from Jan Seifert
• Blog post from Bente Kalsnes
• Blog post from Jon Worth

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It’s a general meetup but with a focus on CKAN packaging so feel free to come and chat about anything open knowledge related — everyone and anyone is welcome.

• When: Saturday 16th May 2009, 1430-1730 BST (1330-1630 GMT, 0930-1230 EDT)
• Where: #okfn irc channel on irc.oftc.net (connect via mibbit)

More info at (and sign yourself if you want) at:

http://wiki.okfn.org/CkanPackageParty/2

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The 5th Communia Workshop took place last month at the London School of Economics. It brought together researchers, policy-makers, stakeholders and representatives from across Europe, the United States and Australia for two days of talks and discussions about reusing public sector content and data.

In the afternoon of the first day, participants co-drafted a simple statement. If you support the statement, we encourage you to sign - regardless of whether or not you attended the workshop:

• Public sector content and data must be made freely and openly available to all without delay for use and re-use.
  • Sign the statement: http://bit.ly/6gZWk
  • Microblog version: http://identi.ca/notice/3655959

In addition many of the speakers made suggestions for policy recommendations, which are available at:

• http://wiki.okfn.org/communia/recommendations

Documentation, including audio, video and slides, will be published at:

• http://communia-project.eu/ws05

Material published so far includes:

• Tom Watson MP, The government view: progress so far
• James Love, Governments and databases
• Rufus Pollock, Economics of Public Sector Information
• Michael Nicholson, PSI: State control or Public freedom?
• Luis Manuel Ferrão, The need for an European approach
• Brian Fitzgerald, Access to PSI: Policy, Law and Technology
• Mireille van Eechoud, Getting the rights right at the EU level, Does the Public Sector Information Directive Deliver?
• Naomi Korn, In from the cold
• Carol Tullo, Unlocking information, engaging communities
• Ton Zijlstra, Open government data in the Netherlands
• Richard Owens, WIPO and Access to Content: The Development Agenda and the Public Domain
• Ben White, Digitising European Culture: Legal Stasis?
• Tom Moritz, Full Return on Investment: the case for open access to scientific data and information
• Edward Betts, One web page for every book
• Francis Pinter, Open Publishing: Working with the Commercial and Public sectors
• Nadia Arbach, Wikipedia Loves Art
• Mathias Schindler, Bundesarchiv and Wikimedia Commons
• Hilary Roberts, The Imperial War Museum and the Commons on Flickr Armistice Day Project

You can also see:

• A summary of the talks from Melanie Dulong De Rosnay
• Blog post from David Bollier at OnTheCommons
• Blog post from James Love at Knowledge Ecology International
• 5th Communia Workshop Programme (PDF)
• 5th Communia Workshop collection on the Internet Archive
• Photos of the workshop on Flickr:
  • from Jonathan Gray
  • from J. C. De Martin
  • from Ton Zijlstra: set 1 and set 1

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This is an inventory of EU-relevant datasets that is being compiled by EU Transparency, the NGO that made farmsubsidy.org and the Open Knowledge Foundation. It includes data that is already available, as well as data that we know exists but is not published - from budget data and environmental information to postcodes and place names.

This will be launched at the First European Open Data Summit, which will take place 5-7th May 2009 in Brussels.

For more information on contributing to the European Open Data Inventory, see:

• http://wiki.okfn.org/ckan/eutransparency

If you’re interested in attending the summit, please add your details to:

• http://wiki.okfn.org/ckan/eutransparency/participate

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