The following guest post is by David Osimo, European policy analyst and member of the OKF’s Working Groups on Open Government Data and EU Open Data Who are the civic hackers? What are their motivations and barriers? What impact are government 2.0 initiatives having? And most importantly, what policy choices should the EU make? To […]
The following post is from Kat Braybrooke, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The OKFN now has an open-concept office space in downtown London at the amazing Centre for Creative Collaboration, thanks to one of the Centre’s representatives, Brian Condon. And as the OKFN’s London Community Coordinator, I have to say we’re all excited […]
This post comes from Lucy Chambers: Community Coordinator at the OKF. This week, she will be collecting designs for OKF T-Shirts We are in the process of creating some new OKF T-Shirts and would like to know what you would like to see on them! Whether you have a witty slogan, beautiful version of the […]
OKCon2011 is glad to announce that registration has now opened for the pre-OKCon workshops. More details can be found below. Pre-OKCon2011 CKAN Workshop Tuesday, June 28, 2011 from 9:30 AM – 6:00 PM (GMT+0100) A chance to get hands-on with the technical side of working with CKAN. In each session, a core CKAN developer will […]
In November 2010, Rufus Pollock announced the Annotator project on the OKFN blog. Since this initial release the project has been developed into a fully fledged product. The Annotator is a JavaScript widget that can be added to any webpage to allow inline annotation of its contents. Combined with a storage system, such as AnnotateIt, […]
Welcome to the seventeenth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! For a plain text version for email please see Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 17 – on our main okfn-announce list. OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 17 Contents: Announcing… The Open Data Challenge! OKCon 2011: Call for Participation New Working Group on Open Economics launches Yourtopia.net GetTheData.org […]
The Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010 Call for Participation and Registration 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 (bottom of page). Open Knowledge Conference 2011: Call for Participation When? […]
The Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010 Call for Participation and Registration 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 (bottom of page). Open Knowledge Conference 2011: Call for Participation When? […]
The following guest post is from Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain It’s The Year of the eBook! Project Gutenberg, the granddaddy of all eBook libraries, announced today they have put number 40,000 of internally produced free eBooks online as of March […]
Welcome to the sixteenth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! For a plain text version for email please see Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 16 – on our main okfn-announce list. OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 16 Contents: Open Government Data Camp 2010 Launch of PublicData.eu Europe’s Energy CKAN keeps on growing – new releases, and launch […]
What can you do with open access to data? What great ideas do you have for utilising open access to bibliographic catalogues? Or what example prototypes can you come up with? We want to find out! 2 x £50 prizes for great ideas using bibliographic data 2 x £500 prizes for building prototype apps using […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re proud to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation is part of a new team which will take on the maintenance of ePSIplatform project for the next two years. As many of you will know ePSIplatform is a key resource for […]
The following is a guest post by James Harriman-Smith who is coordinator of the Open Shakespeare project. This weekend we’re holding the first Open Shakespeare Annotation Sprint — participate and help change criticism forever! We’ll be getting together online and in-person to collaborate on critically annotating a complete Shakespeare play with all our work being […]
The following post is by Mark McGillivrary, a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. Last week the Open Biblio Principles were launched by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. The principles are the product of six months of development and discussion within the working group […]
The following post is by Tony Hirst, who has been working with Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge to create http://GetTheData.org/, a new question and answer site for data-related questions. Where can I find a list of airports with their locations? Where can I find historical weather data? How do I find the county from […]
We’re delighted to announce CKAN v1.2, a new major release of the CKAN software. This is the largest iteration so far with 146 tickets closed and includes some really significant improvements most importantly a new extension/plugin system, SOLR search integration, caching and INSPIRE support (more details below). The extension work is especially significant as it […]
The following guest post is from John Wilkin who is Executive Director of the HathiTrust, a Librarian at the University of Michigan and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. In the conversations about openness of bibliographic data, I often find myself in an odd position, vehemently in support of it […]
The JISC funded OpenBib project, of which OKF is a partner, announced last week in collaboration with the British Library the release of 3 million open bibliographic records to the community. This release represents a milestone for open bibliography as it represents the first substantial corpus of bibliographic data to be released in an open […]
This is a post by Rufus Pollock, co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation and a member of the Board. The “Elektrischer Reporter” team in cooperation with the second channel of German television (ZDF) have just released a great video about Open Data. I’m interviewed in it along with Daniel Dietrich (OKFN Germany and Open Data […]
We’re delighted to announce that our friends at the Open Data Network and OKF Deutschland last week released some work that they have been doing to collate and visualise information related to public spending in Germany: Infosthetics broke the news: Offener Haushalt [offenerhaushalt.de] (German for ‘open budget’) is another demonstration of the large potential behind […]
I’m very pleased to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation is seeking to create a new, paid role to serve our organisation and community, and to help us respond to the phenomenal growth in interest in all things “open knowledge” we’ve been witnessing this year. We’re looking for a Project Coordinator, someone with a passion […]
This weekend, following hot on the heels of the Government 2.0 Camp, members of the Foundation’s Working Group on EU Open Data will be meeting up in person for a 2-day book sprint to create an Open Data Manual. Full details on the wiki page: http://wiki.okfn.org/Open_Data_Manual More background from Ton Zijlstra’s notice on EPSI Platform: […]
Last week, the Foundation’s legal expert Jordan Hatcher, was at iSemantic conference in Graz to give a session on open data licensing (especially for linked data). Here are the slides: Linked Data Licensing: Introduction – I-Semantics 2010 View more presentations from jordanhatcher.
On Friday the data.gov.uk team announced the first meeting of a new Public Sector Transparency Board: The Board will drive forward the Government’s transparency agenda, making it a core part of all government business and ensuring that all Whitehall departments meet the new tight deadlines set for releasing key public datasets. In addition, it is […]
We are delighted to announce that the authors of the Panton Principles have been awarded the SPARC Innovator prize! The principles are currently maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Data in Science. From the announcement: Science is based on building on, reusing, and openly criticizing the published body of scientific knowledge. […]
Today in the UK the Conservatives/Liberal Democrat coalition presented their Emergency Budget. Collaborating with David McCandless, Where Does My Money Go? have created a simple visualization to help you understand and contextualise the budget, and answer some basic questions such as: How much impact will the emergency budget have on the £156bn budget deficit? And […]
Where Does Your Money Go? challenges you to beat the Chancellor to it before tomorrow’s budget and close the UK’s financial deficit. Will you increase taxes, make cuts or a mix of both? No decision is going to be popular but are some more palatable than others, you decide. More information: Closing the Deficit Gap […]
It’s time to talk a bit about Bibliographica, a new project of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Bibliographica is designed to make it easier for scholars and researchers to share and collect information about work in their field. It provides an open source software platform to create and share semantically rich information about publications, authors and […]
Warwickshire County Council pinged us earlier this week to let us know about the launch of their new open data site! The site hosts a range of data sets – available in CVS or XML. For example there are details about education in the region, including: Number of pupils enrolled in Warwickshire schools by school […]
It’s April, and in the UK the sun has, at last, been sighted! To add to the cheer, The Open Knowledge Foundation’s 5th Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) takes place in ten days time on Saturday 24th April in London. Tickets for OKCon 2010 are selling rapidly, so for those who’d like to ensure their place […]
We’re delighted to welcome Nat Torkington to the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Advisory Board! You may have seen his two recent pieces on O’ Reilly Radar on the future of open data: Truly Open Data and Rethinking Open Data (also co-posted on the OKF blog). His thoughts on the topic have a lot in common with […]
Subsequent to the recent consultation on Ordnance Survey data and Gordon Brown’s commitment to opening up (an unspecified amount of) the data in a speech last week – today the UK’s mapping agency is releasing a significant portion of their data for free use by the public. More information is available in the following report, […]
Welcome to the fourteenth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! For a plain text version for email, please see Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 14 – on our main okfn-announce list OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 14 Contents: Mapping open government data around the world Launch of the Panton Principles for open data in science Where Does […]
This Thursday (11th March) I’m speaking at the Forum Virium’s Open Up the City event in Helsinki. This year their focus is on “open data, design, interfaces and innovation” and I’m speaking under the title “Open Data: What, Why, How?”. It looks like this will be a very interesting event and it’s also a chance […]
The IV Jornadas de SIG Libre is taking place this week from the 10th-12th of March in Girona, Spain. This is the premier spanish F/OSS GIS event and OKFNer Jo Walsh will be speaking: http://www.sigte.udg.edu/jornadassiglibre/keynotes
Datapkg 0.5 has been released! This is the first release deemed suitable for public consumption (though we are still in alpha)! This announce therefore serves as both introduction and release announcement. Introduction From the docs: datapkg is an user tool for distributing, discovering and installing data (and content) ‘packages’. datapkg is a simple way to […]
We are pleased to announce the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science: http://www.pantonprinciples.org/ From the preamble: Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge. For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavours, it is crucial that science data […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation and Access Info are currently seeking information on open government data initiatives around the world, as part of a scoping paper supported by the Open Society Institute: With major announcements from the UK and and the US in the past few months, and numerous open government data catalogues popping up around […]
Last autumn we released the first draft of a working paper on opening up data related to international development. The report covers how to legally and technically open up aid data, as well as recommendations for how to make aid data easier to find and reuse. This is now up on a dedicated website at: […]
As regular readers of the Open Knowledge Foundation blog will know, bibliographic metadata is a subject close to our heart (see e.g., here, here and here). Hence we were delighted to see today’s announcement that CERN Library are releasing their bibliographic metadata under an open license! From the announcement: Librarians are in general very favourable […]
Data.gov.uk goes public today, and we’ve very proud that it is using CKAN, our open source registry of open data, to list official UK government datasets (as we announced in October): We’ve been working closely with the Cabinet Office team to get this out the door, and over 2500 datasets have been released via the […]
As you may well have seen, last Thursday the Greater London Authorities announced the new London Datastore: From the press release: The Mayor of London will unveil plans for the capital’s first open data project which will see large amounts of previously unavailable information from City Hall released online. Similar to the hugely successful ‘Apps […]
Welcome to the thirteenth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! For a plain text version for email, please see: Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 13 – on our main okfn-announce list Microblog version: RT @jwyg: Open Knowledge Foundation @okfn Newsletter No. 13: http://bit.ly/7CeAfN OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 13 Contents: Seasons Greetings from the Open Knowledge Foundation! […]
We’re very pleased to see that a large collection of German language digital texts has just been released under an open license. Yesterday, it was announced that Wikimedia Germany, Creative Commons Germany and TextGrid are releasing a large collection of “culturally valuable” texts either in the public domain or under a CC-BY license, which is […]
We’re very pleased to welcome Dr Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University to the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Board of Directors. Welcome aboard, Ian! http://okfn.org/about/people#DrIanBrown A bit more about Dr Brown: Dr Brown is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at Oxford University. His research is focused on […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Jordan Hatcher was recently interviewed by the Semantic Web Company about Why we can’t use the same open licensing approach for databases as we do for content and software: Legal certainty is crucial when it comes to build business around new technologies. The Open Knowledge Foundation has started to tackle this […]
This morning UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced plans to open up lots more UK Government data! His speech describes plans to put much more detailed information online under open licenses in 2010. This includes: public services performance data – including on crime, hospitals and schools new transport data geospatial data from Ordnance survey (as […]
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 […]
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 […]
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