We are excited to announce that Professor Hans Rosling, Director of the Gapminder Foundation and Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet, has joined the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Advisory Board! The Gapminder project is an excellent example of how public data can be built upon to create rich and compelling new applications. Hans is a […]
In just over a week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will release a new version of their website – which will mostly be under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia license. From the announcement: Creative Commons provides a spectrum of licensing for the use of intellectual property between full copyright and public domain – […]
Biblios.net, “the world’s largest database of freely-licensed library records”, is now beta-testing. From their website: ‡biblios.net is a subscription-based, hosted version of the open-source ‡biblios metadata editor that we released earlier this year. In addition to the editor, ‡biblios.net includes some extended community features such as integrated real-time chat, forums, and private messaging. ‡biblios.net also […]
We’re pleased to announce that (subject to final confirmation) the Open Knowledge Foundation is now a member of the EU funded COMMUNIA network, which is “the European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain”. (We blogged about the first workshop in January and the third workshop in October.) As it says on the goals page: […]
After the success of Open Everything London a few weeks ago, we’re now involved in putting on Open Everything Berlin, which will take place in early December. It will be a great opportunity to meet people interested in open knowledge, open source software, and so on. Details are as follows: When: Saturday 6th December 2008 […]
We’ve just added a Greek translation of the Open Knowledge Definition! Many thanks to Ioannis Doukas of King’s College London and the University of Athens! 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 […]
Fantastic news from the Free Software Foundation which has just announced that the latest draft (v.1.3) of the GNU Free Documentation will strive to address problems with license interoperability by allowing users to switch to a CC-BY-SA license: This version of the license allows public wikis to relicense their FDL-covered materials under the Creative Commons […]
Just in time for our upcoming workshops a new version of CKAN (v0.7) is ready. It provides some major improvements including: Convert to use SQLAlchemy and vdm v0.3 (v. major) Atom/RSS feed for Recent Changes Package search via name and title Tag lists show number of associated packages The CKAN code is available from: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ckan/0.7 […]
See http://pypi.python.org/pypi/shakespeare/0.6 which includes full installation instructions. We’ve also reorganized the sites so that the news/blog is here at http://blog.openshakespeare.org/ and the Shakespeare package web interface is at http://www.openshakespeare.org. Main changes include: Major refactoring of internal code to be cleaner and simpler A new cleaner and reorganized web interface Search support via Xapian: http://www.openshakespeare.org/search/ Statistical […]
As many of you will have gathered, 14th October 2008 was Open Access Day. Peter Suber (of Open Access News and on the OKF’s Advisory Board) and Gavin Baker have provided an 8 page roundup of some of the comments on OA from around the world (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8). You […]
As you may know, we’ve been involved in co-organising Open Everything London with the Young Foundation, the Shuttleworth Foundation and Open Business. We’re pleased to say that details are now confirmed… When: Thursday 6th November, 0900-1730 and then drinks afterwards… Where: The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 8EH (map) Wiki: http://openeverything.wik.is/London Cost: £15 donation […]
On Monday we hosted a virtual meeting on open textbooks. A transcript of the meeting is up on the wiki page. There is also a brief writeup on Wikibooks News. Several things to come out of the meeting: There was general agreement that it would great if people interested in and working with open textbooks […]
We’ve recently updated Open Shakespeare. The project was started a while back as an open knowledge ‘exemplar project’ – i.e. as a simple ‘hello world’ type open knowledge package (for more on this see the FAQ). It aims to: Provide the complete works of Shakespeare, along with textual apparatus (introduction, notes) and tools (concordance, search […]
In addition to our Open Text Book project, we’re very interested in the creation, distribution, use and re-use of open textbooks. We’ve arranged a virtual meeting later this month for anyone interested. Details are as follows: When: Monday 29th September, 1000 PST, 1800 BST or 1900 CEST Where: #okfn IRC channel at oftc.net. To join […]
After discussions with Cameron Neylon of Open Wetware and Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons we’ve set up an open science mailing list: http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/open-science As far as we could tell, there wasn’t a general mailing list for people interested open science. Hence the new list aims cover this gap, and to strengthen and consolidate the open […]
Science Commons in the person of Donna Wentworth have done an interview with me as part of their series on “Voices from the Future of Science”. Among other things, I talked about what we can learn from the open source movement (Debian of Data anyone), current status and future plans for CKAN, and why we […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation now has an account on Identi.ca (an open service which we posted about last month): http://identi.ca/okfn There is also a group on (the pretty non-open) LinkedIn! http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=159750
We are pleased to welcome Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons, onto the Advisory Council for opendefinition.org. The Advisory Council, as we announced in February is the body formally responsible for maintaining and developing the Definitions and associated material found on the opendefinition.org site – including the Open Knowledge Definition and the Open Software […]
For more than a year we’ve been working with a variety of groups and individuals to fashion a clear definition of ‘openness’ in relation to online, software-based, ‘services’ (think: search engines, webmail, online spreadsheets, etc). The result, launched today, is the Open Software Service Definition: http://www.opendefinition.org/ossd/ Simultaneously released, and to which we are party, the […]
Version v0.6 of the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) software has just been released (and simultaneously rolled out to the site). Changes include: Autocompletion (+ suggestion) of tags when adding tags to a package. Paginated lists for packages, tags, and revisions. RESTful machine API for package access, update, listing and creation. API Keys for users […]
Today the number of packages in the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) has passed the 200 mark! CKAN is an open registry of (open) knowledge packages – from genes to geodata, sonnets to statistics. CKAN currently includes basic metadata about each package – including title, URL, download URL, tags, license information and notes. Packages include […]
We’ve just added an Italian translation of the annotated Open Knowledge Definition – thanks to Primavera De Filippi, Andrea Glorioso and Juan Carlos De Martin at the NEXA Center for Internet & Society, Politecnico di Torino! If you’d like to translate the Definition into another language, or if you’ve already done so, please get in […]
v0.2 of versioned domain model is now finally done — it was 95% complete in Feb but it has taken another 3 months to iron out the last bugs and polish up! Apart from being a concrete implementation of a system for versioning data(bases) — and therefore important for efforts to do more collaborative development […]
Jordan Hatcher, of opencontentlawyer.com and chair of the Advisory Council for the Open Knowledge Definition took the Public Domain Dedication & License out of beta on Saturday at OKCon. The PDDL (which we blogged about in December) was initially sponsored by Talis and is specifically aimed at providing a suitable license for open data — […]
Jordan Hatcher, of opencontentlawyer.com and chair of the Advisory Council for the Open Knowledge Definition took the Public Domain Dedication & License out of beta on Saturday at OKCon. The PDDL (which we blogged about in December) was initially sponsored by Talis and is specifically aimed at providing a suitable license for open data — […]
Our second annual Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) is taking place tomorrow. Like last year, the event will bring together individuals and groups from across the open knowledge spectrum for a day of seminars and workshops. Though we’re nearing capcity, there are still a few places left for last minute registrants! Details When: Saturday 15th March […]
We are pleased to announce the launch of an Advisory Council for opendefinition.org. The Council will be formally responsible for maintaining and developing the Definitions and associated material found on the Open Definition site – including the Open Knowledge Definition and the Open Service Definition. As many of you will know, these definitions aim to […]
Tomorrow I’ll be speaking with Nate Olson at the latest Oxford Geek Night on the subject of Open Knowledge and Componentization. Here’s the blurb: Componentization on a large scale (such as in the Debian ‘apt’ packaging system) has allowed large software projects to be amazingly productive through their use of a decentralised, collaborative, incremental development […]
The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) version 0.5 has just been released. Changes include: feature to list and search tags feature to make data available in machine-usable form via sql dump feature to purge a revision and associated changes support for reserved html characters in urls upgrade to Pylons 0.9.6 new spam management utilities including […]
Last night Science Commons announced the release of the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data: The Protocol is a method for ensuring that scientific databases can be legally integrated with one another. The Protocol is built on the public domain status of data in many countries (including the United States) and provides legal certainty to […]
OKCon 2008 – ‘Open Knowledge: Applications, Tools and Services’ where: London School of Economics, London, UK when: 15th March 2008 (1030-1830) www: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/ register: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/ wiki: http://www.okfn.org/wiki/okcon2008/ Following on from the success of our inaugural conference last year, we’re pleased to announce that the second Open Knowledge conference (OKCon) will take place on Saturday 15th […]
Recently the Agile Knowledge and Semantic Web research group (AKSW) at Universität Leipzig launched Cofundos.org. Confundos aims to help people share, refine, fund and realise new ideas for open software and knowledge projects. It was founded and developed by Sören Auer, who leads the AKSW research group (and is on the OKF’s advisory board). The […]
Jordan Hatcher (Open Content Lawyer) and Dr. Charlotte Waelde (University of Edinburgh) have just published the first draft of the Open Data Commons, or the Open Database License. The new license was inspired by the Talis Community License (a draft open license for data from 2006) and its development has been sponsored by Talis. The […]
Another release of KForge is out (mainly bugfixes and minor feature enhancements). Changes include: Ensuring admin pages at /admin/ and not just /admin/model/. Setting zip_safe to False in setup.py to avoid problems with apache/modpython. Bringing the guide completely up to date. Ensuring access control works with Apache 2.0 and not just 2.2. Alphabetical sorting of […]
Yesterday I was at the SCL’s “Law 2.0? : New Speech, New Property, New Identity” talking on Openness, Web 2.0 and the Ethic of Sharing. The full text of my talk is inline below, there are companion slides up online (more graphics!) and for those who like source here a link to the markdown original. […]
As mentioned previously on this blog recent developments, particularly the increase in ‘Software as a Service’ approaches, have created the need to think hard about what would constitute an `Free/Open Service’ (as opposed to just plain Free/Open Source software or Free/Open Knowledge). Following extensive discussion in the last couple of months on the okfn-discuss mailing […]
After another six months of work we’ve released a new version of the KForge software. KForge/KnowledgeForge is one the OKF’s main activities with the KForge software being used to run the KnowledgeForge service. Over two and half years after work first started the project is now fairly mature with a growing number of projects hosted […]
After a year of (off and on) development we are delighted today to announce the official launch of the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN for short): http://www.ckan.net/. CKAN is a registry of open knowledge packages and projects — be that a set of Shakespeare’s works, a global population density database, the voting records of MPs, […]
Over the last month we’ve been working to produce a Guide to Open Data Licensing. As the name should make clear this is a guide to licensing data aimed particularly at those who want to make their data open. The guide is currently located on the wiki so that anyone can edit and update it: […]
Today we are pleased to announce the launch of Open Textbook, a place to list and keep track of news about textbooks that are open in accordance with the Open Knowledge Definition — i.e. free to use, reuse, and redistribute. We welcome participation in the project and if anyone has a textbook or notes they’d […]
Today we published our 2006-2007 annual report that details some of what we have been up to over the last year. The following is taken from the introduction to that report. Introduction In May this year the Open Knowledge Foundation celebrated its third birthday. Much has changed in that time and the last year is […]
Last week I was at the XTech conf along with Jo Walsh in order to present in the Open Data track. We built on our recent discussion to argue for the fundamental importance of componentization in developing the Open Data/Knowledge ecosystem — you can find the slides of our talk (entitled Open Data and Componentization) […]
This is the fourth release of the Open Economics project and the first that has been deemed ‘worthy’ of a full release announcement. The Open Economics project provides data storage and visualization for economics data as well as associated web services and assorted modelling code. The project home page is: http://www.okfn.org/econ/ while the open economics […]
A new version of open shakespeare is out. Get it via the code page: http://www.openshakespeare.org/code/ Changelog Annotation of texts (js-based in browser) (ticket:20, ticket:21) (http://www.openshakespeare.org/2007/04/10/annotation-is-working/) Switch to unicode for internal string handling (resolves ticket:23: some texts breaking the viewer) Add functional tests for the web interface (ticket:11) Substantial improvements to speed of concordance (ticket:22) (http://www.openshakespeare.org/2007/01/03/improvements-to-the-concordance/) […]
We’ve been doing more work on the Open Shakespeare project with the result that a new version (v0.4) is ready for release (full details including the Changelog can be found below). For those unfamiliar with the project, Open Shakespeare has two basic aims. First, to provide a simple but compelling open knowledge exemplar — and […]
After another push over the last few days I’ve got the web annotation system for Open Shakespeare operational (we’ve been hacking on this on and off since back in December). To see the system in action visit: http://demo.openshakespeare.org/view?name=phoenix_and_the_turtle_gut&format=annotate Quite a bit of effort has been made to decouple the annotation system from Open Shakespeare so […]
I’ll be speaking on the Copyright Users panel at the Copyright and Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences conference which takes place this Friday (30th March 2007) in Edinburgh. The event is being jointly organised by The British Academy and the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the […]
Open Knowledge 1.0 took place last Saturday at Limehouse Town Hall in London. Over 70 people came to hear the panels and participate in the open space. Material (including speaker presentations) and related links from the event are being posted online at http://www.okfn.org/okcon/after/. We’ve had excellent feedback and in my opinion (though of course I […]
Open Knowledge 1.0, which takes place on Saturday March the 17th at Limehouse Town Hall in London, is now just over a week away. While there are still some places left we are nearing capacity so, if you would like to come, we advise you to register as soon as possible via: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/register/ Open Knowledge […]
I authored the following short essay for publication in a pamphlet produced by the RSA entitled Promoting innovation and rewarding creativity: A balanced intellectual property framework for the digital age. The pamphlet was published at the beginning of January and along with my piece included items by Matthew Taylor (Chief Executive of the RSA), Lynne […]
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