We are delighted to announce the launch of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, which took place yesterday at the Leipzig Semantic Web Day. The OKF Germany chapter will be dedicated to promoting all forms of open knowledge in Germany — including open government data, open data in science, and the public domain. Work is already […]
The following post is from Donovan Hide, a developer working on the Straight Choice project. Donovan explains how he made an increasingly popular picture of the election. Over 5000 leaflets have been collected, scanned or photographed and then uploaded by the public to the the straight choice. All these images were very colourful and varied, […]
If you’d asked me back in 2005, I’d have told you that the 2010 election would be the first online election. It turned out not to be. For example, the YouTube and Facebook leaders debate was much less important than the Television debates. However, there are a few places relating to data where the Internet […]
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 […]
Not so long ago we were in contact with David Eaves, a Canadian public policy analyst and open government data advocate (who advises the Mayor of Vancouver about open data and open government), about starting an catalogue for Canadian open government data. A couple of weeks ago he and a small team of coders and […]
The following guest post is from Andreas Langegger who is at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on EU Open Data. Historically, transparency has never been our strength – let’s shape the future. Transparency and public sector information policy have always been rather infamous topics in Austria. […]
We’re very excited about this year’s annual Open Knowledge Conference, OKCon 2010, which will take place in London tomorrow! http://www.okfn.org/okcon/ Speakers and sessions include: ‘State of the Nation’ Keynotes: Matthias Schindler, Wikimedia (Germany) on ‘Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain’ Glyn Moody, on the ‘Post-Analogue World’ Peter Murray-Rust, on ‘Recent Developments in Open Science’ Chris […]
The following post is from David Read, a developer working on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN project. David attended the Greater London Authorities’ Possibilities of Real Time Data conference earlier this week. London’s authorities have opened up lots of their data this year, kicking off in January with the launch of the London Data Store […]
Today, the World Bank announced that it’s making a large portion of its development data open and available from a dedicated new website at: http://data.worldbank.org The excellent set of new term and conditions are http://opendefinition.org/-compliant so this is real open data, available under an explicit license which allows for use, reuse and redistribution by anyone! […]
The following post is from Lisa Evans, who is doing research on UK public finance data sources as part of our Where Does My Money Go? project. Freedom of information: sharing our experiences I’ve been reading some debate on the extent to which Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are a drain on public resources. A […]
Following is a guest post from Daniel Dietrich, Chairman of the Open Data Network, Official Representative of the Open Knowledge Foundation in Germany and Researcher at the centre for Computers and Society at the Technical University Berlin. In this post I will try to give you an overview and update on what is happening on open […]
Open Knowledge Scotland “brings together interested parties from across the open knowledge spectrum based in Scottish educational institutions, Scottish research organisations, Scottish local and national government, and members of the public for the purposes of teaching, learning and discussion”. OKCon in London is now in its fifth year. It seemed like time to put together […]
The following guest post is from Olav Anders Øvrebø, Assistant Professor at the University of Bergen, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on EU Open Data. At the government data project at the University of Bergen, we see the Norwegian language version of CKAN, launched this week, as a significant step on […]
The following guest post is from John Mark Ockerbloom, library scientist at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and editor of The Online Books Page. He blogs at Everybody’s Libraries. I’ve recently gotten involved with two Open Knowledge Foundation working groups, one on open bibliographic data and one on identifying public domain materials. Folks who follow […]
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, […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation has a keen interest in opening up data on international development – from our international development panel at OKCon 2009, to our recent report on unlocking aid information, to our working group on open knowledge in development. Hence we are delighted to be co-organising the Aid Information Challenge, along withAid Info, […]
The following guest post is from Hjalmar Gislason, an open data activist, member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on EU Open Data, and founder of structured data start-up, DataMarket. The Wave of Open Data Open access to public sector information, or simply “Open Data” is gathering a lot of momentum these days. High […]
These comments were originally written a few weeks ago as part of an interesting thread on John Dupuis’ blog post about the Panton Principles. What’s “Open” and Why Do the Panton Principles Recommend PD-only The Open Knowledge Foundation’s general position is one of supporting open data where “open” data includes data made available under licenses […]
The following press release is reproduced with permission from Adrian Pohl and Felix Ostrowski, who are both at the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center and who are both members of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data – launched earlier this month. We’ve added a koeln-library-data package to the bibliographic data group […]
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 […]
In the past few weeks there have been a number of developments related to opening up bibliographic metadata. At the end of January we blogged about CERN opening up their library data. Just recently Ghent University Library have published their data under an open license (see ugent_biblio and ugent_catalog) – which is excellent news! At […]
The following guest post is from Stefano Costa at the University of Siena. He is Founder of the IOSA initiative and Coordinator of a new Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology. Archaeological data is often not shared According to Wikipedia, archaeology is the “science and humanity that studies historical human cultures […]
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 following guest post is from Olav Anders Øvrebø, Assistant Professor at the University of Bergen, who recently worked on a report on open government data in Norway. A loose community is forming, slowly pushing open data higher on the agenda of Norway’s politicians and civil servants. But these developers, journalists, academics, and IT business […]
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: […]
We’ve been working hard to set up instances of CKAN for open government data – most notably in data.gov.uk but also for open government data in Germany, France, Canada and elsewhere. We are currently soliciting for feedback on how we can improve CKAN’s user interface and for suggestions for new features. We’re also in touch […]
Nat Torkington recently wrote the following piece on O’Reilly Radar. He kindly gave us permission to republish it on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog… In the last year I’ve been involved in two open data projects, Open New Zealand and data.govt.nz. I believe in learning from experience and I’ve seen some signs recently that other […]
We recently attended a workshop in Luxembourg as part of Communia, the EU policy network on the digital public domain. There was a focus on bringing together themes from previous events to make a series of policy recommendations to the European Commission (watch this space!). Below are a few notes highlighting some of the talks […]
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 […]
The following guest post is by David Jones who is, among other things, a curator of the climate data group on CKAN (the OKF’s open source registry of open data) and co-founder of Clear Climate Code (which we blogged about back in 2008). Clear Climate Code have been working on ccc-gistemp, a project to reimplement […]
When data.gov.uk was launched, I had a quick browse around the data, to get a feel for what was in it. Most data sets that I randomly looked at were from statistics.gov.uk (from the Office for National Statistics). Today, I decided to investigate, and work out some basic statistics about the source of the data. […]
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 […]
The following guest post is from Regards Citoyens, a French association of citizens with a shared interest in opening up information about the functioning of democratic institutions in France. France is lagging behind… There is no doubt about it: compared to other countries, France is definitely late in opening up its data. For a country […]
There has recently been a flurry of activity in the Open Street Map community to improve maps of Haiti to assist humanitarian aid organisations responding to the recent earthquake. In particular mappers and developers are scouring satellite images to identify collapsed and damaged buildings/bridges, spontaneous refugee camps, landslides, blocked roads and other damaged infrastructure – […]
Last week we had several planning sessions for our Where Does My Money Go? project – to discuss where to go next and what our priorities will be for the next major release. We had some excellent feedback from the launch of our prototype before Christmas – and the release was covered in the BBC […]
Yesterday Open Data Commons released a draft of a new attribution license specifically aimed at data and databases. We would warmly welcome feedback on the new draft, and help circulating it to relevant parties (including legal experts, prospective users and so on)! From the announcement: Open Data Commons are happy to announce the first draft […]
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 […]
Just before Christmas, the UK Government announced a new report on Making local public expenditure data public, and the development of Local Spending Reports. The report outlines government plans to publish lots more information on where UK public money is spent at local level: It is critical […] that information on public expenditure should be […]
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! […]
Several of us from the Open Knowledge Foundation will be at the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin after Christmas. The 26th Chaos Communication Congress takes place from December 27th to December 30th 2009. OKF Director Rufus Pollock will give a talk on ‘CKAN: apt-get for the Debian of Data‘. If you’re planning to attend, we’d […]
The project presentations from last month’s Visualizar seminar have now been posted online. This annual event brought together creative teams from a range of disciplines, with the objective of delivering workable presentations using freely available data resources. The theme for 2009 was Public Data – Data In Public. I was fortunate enough to attend 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 […]
We’re very pleased to announce the first full release of our Where Does My Money Go? prototype. This is now online at: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype Tom Watson MP, commented on the new release: Where Does My Money Go represents another milestone in the UK’s transparency movement. We know that transparency changes individual and institutional behaviour and this […]
So far its been a good week for open government data (and its only Tuesday)! After yesterday’s announcement from UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, today the US Government’s Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra gave a live webcast from the Whitehouse to announce the release of the new Open Government […]
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 […]
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 […]
MusicBrainz is a user-maintained community music metadatabase. The MusicBrainz community collects and maintains data about recorded music releases such as artist name, release title and track listing. That data is re-used by music services across the web, including Amazon and Last.fm, as well as in Free and Open Source Software applications. Robert Kaye is Executive […]
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 […]
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