Switch from Kid to Genshi for templating in the Web Interface

Today we made the switch from kid to genshi as our templating toolkit in the web interface. Kid has served us well but there are some issues with debugging and including input that can’t be guaranteed to be well-formed. Genshi, as a direct derivative of Kid, delivers very similar syntax but is both simpler and […]

Open Knowledge Forum on Civic Information No. 2

Organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation in association with the UCL faculty of Computer Science (Ian Brown) Web page: http://www.okfn.org/okforums/civicinfo2/ Speakers John Sheridan, Head of e-Services at the Office of Public Sector Information Heather Brooke of Your Right to Know Julian Todd of http://www.publicwhip.org/ on “Other publicwhip-type projects I’d like to see and why” Richard […]

Does an ‘open’ scan of a shakespeare folio exist?

We’d really like to have some nice images of a shakespeare first folio (if possible from Hamlet) for use in the Open Shakespeare project. However all the scanned copies we’ve managed to find seem to be under full ‘all rights reserved’ copyright. For example there’s an online version from the Schoenberg Schoenberg Center for Electronic […]

v0.3 of Open Shakespeare Released

We’ve been doing quite a bit of work on the Open Shakespeare project (which we’ve mentioned before). Given that a brief search on the net turns up many sites about Shakespeare and lots of online copies of shakespeare’s texts you might be forgiven for asking why do we need another shakespeare project? In the new […]

Version 1.0 of the Open Knowledge Definition Released

The Open Knowledge Definition (OKD) provides an answer to the question: what is open knowledge? It puts forward, in a simple and clear manner, principles that define open knowledge and which open knowledge licenses should satisfy. After various improvements and lots of feedback over the last year to the initial draft, version 1.0 of the […]

Open Shakespeare v0.2

With a little bit of free time over the last couple of weeks I’ve managed to do some more work on open shakespeare. The new version (v0.2dev) is up and running on the site: http://openshakespeare.org/ (formerly http://demo.openshakespeare.org/). NB: concordance only includes sonnets (this is not a necessary restriction but saved on concordance build time). Many […]

KForge 0.11 Released

The KForge/KnowledgeForge project is one the OKF’s core activities and the KForge software is being used to run both http://www.knowledgeforge.net/ and the administrative backend for the main OKF site: http://admin.okfn.org/. The 0.11 release of KForge introduces a bunch of new features and bugfixes. Full details in this post on the KForge project site.

Public Domain Works Database Project

The Open Knowledge Foundation have been working on a Public Domain Works Database in association with with Free Culture UK (as part of FC-UK’s larger Public Domain Burn project). There is now a front-end site up (as of last weekend!) at: http://www.publicdomainworks.net/ Summary: “The Public Domain Works DB is an [WWW] open registry of artistic […]

Alpha Site Up

As of last weekend there is a alpha version of the registry up at: http://alpha.publicdomainworks.net/ If all went well Tom Chance demoed this at the iCommons summit in Rio de Janeiro. The database system and its interface is in alpha stage and the site is a prototype designed for testing purposes. In particular: This site […]

Composer Data

Many moons ago I came across: http://www.kingkong.demon.co.uk/ Which has lots of data on authors, books and composers (the guy seems to be transcribing a large amount of the US copyright register by hand!). In the light of our work on the db I wrote to the owner of the site at the start of May […]

Open Shakespeare

There are already very impressive examples of open knowledge in the form of projects such as wikipedia, publicwhip, the world-wide molecular matrix etc. However it would be nice to have something a little simpler, some sort of ‘hello world’ type open knowledge project, which would illustrate what we mean by open knowledge and why it […]

The Four Principles of (Open) Knowledge Development

[Further discussion and elucidation of the ideas in this piece can be found in the follow-up: What Do We Mean by Componentization (for Knowledge)?] Introduction Open knowledge means porting much more of the open source stack than just the idea of open licensing. It is about porting many of the processes and tools that attach […]

KForge 0.10 Released

The KForge/KnowledgeForge project is one the OKF’s core activities at present. The KForge software (now with its own site!) has been usable for about six months and stable enough for production use on http://www.knowledgeforge.net/ since the 0.9 release back in December/January. The new 0.10 release of KForge provides a whole bunch of improvements and takes […]

Open Knowledge Definition Released

Following extensive discussion of the first draft we are pleased to announce the public release of the Open Knowledge Definition. A space has also been created on wiki for the Definition which anyone may edit and improve.

The Three Meanings of Open

The OKF is the Open Knowledge Foundation. But what does it mean for knowledge to be open? We take open to have three distinct senses: legal, social and technological. Legally Open Knowledge is legally open if it is free of most of the standard legal restrictions and requirements. In particular it should be accessible without […]