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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Thanks to a pointer from the ever-aware Julian Todd we’re heartened to see these pledges being made at the Conservative Party Conference in the UK: Use open source software as much as possible Publish on a website details of all government spending over £25,000. [ed: great news for Where Does My Money Go] Allow the […]
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 […]
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 […]
The UK Government’s public sector data site launched last week in a private beta — and it’s using CKAN as its backend for storing all its dataset info! They’ve got more than a 1000 existing data sets, from 7 departments, all brought together for the first time in a re-useable form. They’re eager to get […]
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).
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’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 […]
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 […]
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