With the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen starting on Monday, it is of vital important that there is consensus on the scientific evidence about climate change, in order to inform debates about the best course of action for the international community. Sharing the same basic picture about the climate, global warming and the […]
We are very pleased to announce that we now have two new members on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Advisory Board! Glyn Moody, a technology writer and expert on all things open, and Mark Surman, Executive Director at the Mozilla Foundation and one of the founders of Open Everything, have recently joined our prestigious board of […]
We’re currently seeking a design guru to give the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s core web presence a makeover. This is a volunteer position, which will involve working closely with the Foundation to integrate and improve its two most high ranking sites: If you are interested in the position, please get in touch on info at okfn […]
On the first of January every year works from around the world fall out of copyright and into the public domain. But, how do we know which works fall into the public domain when? In previous years there have been blog posts about this – for example, see the Everybody’s Libraries posts from 1st January […]
Last week we had a workshop on Open Data and the Semantic Web in London. There were some excellent talks, demos and discussions – and documentation is now online! As a result of discussions we had at the workshop, we now have two new volunteer positions at the Open Knowledge Foundation. If you’re interested in […]
In a press release earlier this week, it was announced that there will be moves to open up geospatial data produced by the Ordnance Survey: The Prime Minister and Communities Secretary John Denham will today announce that the public will have more access to Ordnance Survey maps from next year, as part of a Government […]
Last week we had a meeting about building a set of Public Domain Calculators for countries across Europe (which we blogged about earlier this month). The public domain calculators will help to determine whether or not a given work is in copyright in a given jurisdiction. We started out by reviewing existing work on the […]
We’ve pleased to announce the alpha release of our Where Does My Money Go prototype. This is a web application that allows you to explore UK public spending – and you can take a look here: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/wdmmg-alpha/ Update: access underlying data here. This an “alpha” release and its still a way from finished – we’re […]
The Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010 Call for Proposals is now open! We would be grateful for help in circulating the call to relevant lists and communities! You can reuse or point to: This blog post Main CFP page Plain text announce (wrapped at 72 characters) Identi.ca post Twitter post Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010: […]
Our Open Data and Semantic Web workshop is coming up next Friday 13th November in London, kindly sponsored by Talis. In preparation for the workshop, we have started a Linking Open Data group on CKAN, our open-source registry of open data, based on the new group feature we announced last week. We currently have 83 […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Jordan Hatcher recently co-led a workshop on Legal and Social Frameworks for Sharing Data on the Web at the 8th International Semantic Web Conference. He was joined by Leigh Dodds and Tom Heath of Talis, and Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons. You can now see: Jordan’s slides – Open Data and […]
We are seeking an Editor for Open Text Book, one of the highest ranked sites on the web for finding textbooks that you can freely use, reuse and redistribute: http://www.opentextbook.org/ This is a volunteer position requiring a one to two day a month commitment. If you are interested in contributing to the world of open […]
Over the last few months there have been lots of exciting announcements about open data from cities around the world. We decided to take a look at what is currently out there – in particular taking note of: Whether datasets are open as in the Open Knowledge Definition – i.e. whether they explicitly say that […]
We’ve recently been working hard to improve CKAN. Now you can try out some of the new features… Groups – While CKAN already allows packages to be categorized with tags, which anyone can edit, now you can create curated groups of packages. Group administrators control who can edit the packages associated with a given group. […]
We recently blogged about some mockups for our Where Does My Money Go? project. We’ve now got some new mockups for the project which are show below (click through for full size). Again, we’d love to hear what you think of the designs! You can either leave a comment below, or pop a note to […]
OpenFlights is a site for “flight logging, mapping, stats and sharing”. We’re very pleased to hear they’ve just released their data under the Open Database License (ODbL): One of OpenFlights‘ most popular features is our dynamic airport and airline route mapping, and today, we’re proud to release the underlying data in an easy-to-use form, up […]
European policy analyst David Osimo recently invited me to be on the steering committee of a new ‘Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0’. The background page says: Every two years, EU Ministers gather to agree on a Ministerial Declaration on e-government, which is the main European strategic document. This is usually accompanied by an Industry […]
We are currently building a prototype for the Where Does My Money Go? – and we’ve now got the first mockups of what the site will look like… For full size versions you can see: spending by region spending by function We’d love to hear what you think of the designs! You can either leave […]
There is often a tendency to talk of ‘the public domain’ and of works falling out of copyright and ‘into the public domain’ – as though there is a single set of works which are out of copyright all over the world. In fact, of course, there are different national laws about the nature and […]
Ernest Maples, a free service providing postcode data which we blogged about in July has recently been taken down due to legal action from the Royal Mail. Harry Metcalfe, one of the directors of the project, writes: On Friday the 2nd October we received correspondence from the Royal Mail demanding that we close this site […]
Yesterday the Australian government announced its new MashupAustralia competition, with a prize fund of over $20,000 Australian dollars: Today the Government 2.0 Taskforce is launching its MashupAustralia contest […]. To fuel your innovative mashup juices, around 59 datasets from the Australian and State and Territory Governments have been released at data.australia.gov.au on license terms and […]
We’ve just added a Macedonian translation of the Open Knowledge Definition thanks to Ljube Babunski. http://opendefinition.org/1.0/Makedonski_jazik 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 on info at the OKF’s domain name (okfn dot org).
Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 12 has just been sent out. If you would like to receive this via email, you can join our main okfn-announce list. Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 12 Welcome to the twelfth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! Contents: New report on sharing aid information is now open for comments Open Data […]
Farm Subsidy have recently released a short film called Fields of Gold: Lifting the Veil on Europe’s Farm Subsidies. The film tells the story of a campaign to open up data about where money from the Common Agricultural Policy goes – from national Freedom of Information requests from the likes of Jack Thurston and Nils […]
We’ve just added a Swedish translation of the Open Knowledge Definition thanks to Peter Krantz (who’s work on open data in Sweden we recently blogged about) and Staffan Malmgren. http://opendefinition.org/1.0/Svenska 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 […]
We’re pleased to announce the publication of a new report, Unlocking the potential of aid information. The report, by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Aidinfo, looks at how to make information related to international development (i) legally open, (ii) technically open and (iii) easy to find. The report and relevant background information can be found […]
Harvard University’s Berkman Center, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute recently released a report on copyright and open licensing for private philanthropic foundations. The report examines: […] the copyright licensing policies and practices of a group of twelve private foundations. In particular, it looked at the extent […]
Where is your nearest postbox, and when is the post collected from it? Now you can get open data showing the locations and collection times of over 116,000 postboxes in the UK. You can browse relevant datasets on CKAN at: http://ckan.net/tag/read/postboxes The story behind this data reads like an inverted version of The Little Red […]
Opengov.se is a registry of open government data in Sweden: Opengov.se is an initiative to highlight available public datasets in Sweden. It contains a commentable catalog of government datasets, their formats and usage restrictions. It makes a note of what percentage of the datasets are fully open – i.e. material that is free for anyone […]
The UK’s Department for Transport (DfT) has recently released data from the National Public Transport Access Node (NaPTAN) database to be put on Open Street Map (OSM). As it says on the NaPTAN website: NaPTAN provides a unique identifier for every point of access to public transport in the UK, together with meaningful text descriptions […]
Last month Rufus Pollock, Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, spoke at OpenTech 2009 in a session with Richard Stirling of the Cabinet Office and John Sheridan of the Office of Public Sector Information. His talk gave a blueprint for how to open up government data: Opening Up Government Data: Give it to Us Raw, […]
Back in June the Australian Minister for Finance announced a new Government 2.0 Taskforce. Part of the work of this new taskforce includes: increasing the openness of government through making public sector information more widely available to promote transparency, innovation and value adding to government information Paralleling recent initiatives such as the UK’s Power of […]
The National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. has just published a new report, The Socioeconomic Effects of Public Sector Information on Digital Networks, edited by Paul Uhlir from the U.S. National Committee for CODATA. There are lots of interesting contributions in the report, including from OKF Advisory Board member Chris Corbin, Communia Coordinator Juan […]
Open Plaques is a project to find and document all the UK’s blue heritage plaques, which commemorate sites where famous events occurred, or with a connection to notable historical figures. There are currently over 1700 plaques, which can be browsed by area, by person, by role or by organisation. Though the project is currently in […]
We’re currently organising a workshop on ‘open data and the semantic web’, which will take place in London this autumn. Details are as follows: When: Friday 13th November 2009, 1000-1800 Where: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, London, WC1N 3QS. (See map) Wiki: http://wiki.okfn.org/SemanticWeb Participation: Attendance is free. If you are planning to come along […]
Openly Local is a recently launched “first draft of getting hold of and making accessible local government data in a consistent and useful form”. There is generally a lot of support for open data from central government in the UK – particularly from the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), the Cabinet Office and with […]
Earlier today the OKF’s Jordan Hatcher and Jo Walsh gave a tutorial on open data at the Repository Fringe 2009. There are some detailed notes on the JISC Datashare blog: Repository Fringe 2009: Afternoon Tutorial (Open Data) Jo gave an overview of the Open Knowledge Foundation – in particular focusing on four principles for developing […]
There have recently been several posts about what features are desirable in government data catalogues. The Sunlight Foundation recently announced they are planning to build on data.gov to allow “community participation so that people can submit their own data sources” (including support for adding data that is not open such as data with noncommercial restrictions). […]
Open dictionaries are excellent examples of open knowledge projects. Whether monolingual or bilingual, and whether dealing with definitions, etymology, translation or pronounciation – they can often be large, collaborative undertakings. Dictionary databases have a wide variety of potential applications – from education and research to machine translation and integration with software applications and services. We’ve […]
Next Wednesday 22nd July there will be a virtual meeting for a new Working Group on Open Knowledge in Development: http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/development If you’re interested in open knowledge and international development you’re welcome to come along and join in discussion, which will be about what the new working group should focus on – as well as […]
Harry Metcalfe and Richard Pope recently let us know about their new postcode lookup API, named after Ernest Marples, the Postmaster General who introduced the Postcode: http://ernestmarples.com/ More about the service: Post codes are really useful, but the powers that be keep them closed unless you have loads of money to pay for them. Which […]
We are pleased to announce the first public beta of Weaving History! Weaving History lets you create ‘factlets‘, containing basic information about historical events, persons, and so on, which you can string together to create historical ‘threads‘. These threads can then be visually represented on maps and timelines. There’s a function that lets you automatically […]
Just over a week ago was the 2nd Communia Workshop, which took place in Turin. The theme was ‘Global Science and the Economics of Knowledge-Sharing Institutions’ – and there was a great line up of scientists, economists, and legal scholars, as well as representatives from various research bodies and NGOs. Papers, slides and audio will […]
Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 11 has just been sent out: Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 11 Welcome to the eleventh Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! Contents: The OKF turns five and we need your support! Open Database License (ODbL) goes 1.0 European Open Data Inventory + Summit Launch of the Open Data Grid New developments […]
EUTransparency, who created FarmSubsidy and organised the European Open Data Summit have launched a new site with data on payments made under the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. From the press release: Today sees the launch of fishsubsidy.org, a new transparency website from the farmsubsidy.org stable. It presents data on 97,260 payments totalling 8.5 billion euro […]
We’ve been doing some more work on Where Does My Money Go?. The project, will provide an interactive represention of UK public finance using maps, timelines, and best of breed visualisation technologies. We’ve now put together a basic visualisation based on data we’ve cleaned up from the Treasury: http://www.openeconomics.net/wdmmg/dept/ We’ve also had confirmation from the […]
We’ve just added a French translation of the Open Knowledge Definition thanks to Caroline Ker and Séverine Dusollier at the University of Namur, Belgium! 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 […]
We have now completed a major load of data into the Public Domain Works database: http://publicdomainworks.net/ There are now 125318 persons, 12840 items and 299141 works in the database. The data we have there comes primarily from two sources: people and book data from Philip Harper’s NGCOBA and recordings data from the online discographies provided […]
We are pleased to welcome two new members to the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Board of Directors: The first is James Casbon, a bioinformatics programmer: James Casbon has been working with open knowledge throughout his professional career. He has been responsible for analysing and managing large scale data sets in genomics, aerospace and finance. He is […]
We’ve just launched a new mailing list for those interested in open knowledge in development: 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 […]
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