Why does this matter? Why bother about openness and licensing for data? After all they don’t matter in themselves: what we really care about are things like the progress of human knowledge or the freedom to understand and share. However, open data is crucial to progress on these more fundamental items. It’s crucial because open […]
Jed Sundwall of Netsquared just published an interview with Rufus Pollock, co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation. The interview includes discussion about the distinction between price and value, about the Open Knowledge Definition, about CKAN, about decentralised approaches to working with large quantities of data, about packaging for knowledge and about ‘Shiny Front End Syndrome’. […]
Recently we made some substantial improvements/additions to our Open Economics project including: Improved javascript graphing. Extend Millenium Development Goals package and added web interface. First efforts at ‘Where Does My Money Go’ Aim: Dig up govt finance info and visualize the results (online) http://okfn.org/wiki/projects/Where_Does_My_Money_Go More details on each of these can be found below. Also […]
Just over a year ago Open Data Commons was launched as a home for the new open data licenses such as the PDDL which had been developed by Jordan Hatcher and Dr Charlotte Waelde. From early on, Jordan, the legal expert and aficianado-of-openness and the main mover behind these efforts, had been talking with us […]
With the inauguration of US President-Elect Barack Obama later today – we thought we’d prepare a brief list of things he can do to promote openness in his new role. Open government data. Make core government data open (as in opendefinition.org) – so that it can be re-used in mashups, visually represented, used in semantic […]
You may have heard that lcsh.info – which explored how Library of Congress Subject Headings could be represented as a Semantic Web application – was closed down last month. The good news is that there are now two new projects publishing library-related open data: http://ckan.net/package/read/iconclass http://ckan.net/package/read/hud-library-usagedata The first, ICONCLASS, is “an experimental service that makes […]
Update (2009-02-23): registration for this workshop is now open. There is also a provisional programme. We are pleased to announce that the 5th COMMUNIA Workshop, “Accessing, Using and Reusing Public Sector Content and Data” will take place in London in March 2009. Details are as follows: When: 26-27th March 2009 Where: New Academic Building, London […]
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 […]
The Workshop on Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources (cf. last week’s announce) took place on Saturday at the London Knowledge Lab. The day started with a discussion of various aspects of openness in educational and research materials – alluding to open access, open data and the Open Knowledge Definition. This was followed by brainstorming […]
As we announced earlier this month, tomorrow is our Workshop on Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources. As a concrete outcome of the workshop, we hope to add more open scientific resources to CKAN, as we did last Saturday in the Workshop on Public Information and which we’ve blogged about in the past. So far, […]
On Saturday was the Workshop on Finding and Re-using Public Information (which we blogged about last week). We had very positive feedback from participants, and we’ll certainly consider doing something similar again in the future. There was representation from across the board – from local government to European policy analysts, from civic society to commercial […]
As we blogged a few weeks back we’re putting on a workshop on ‘Finding and Re-using Public Information’, co-organised with the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), the Power of Information (POI) Taskforce and mySociety. Its coming up this Saturday! Details are as follows: When: Saturday 1st November 2008, 1030-1600 Where: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 […]
We’re pleased to announce another OKF workshop in London this November – on ‘Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources’. As a concrete outcome of the workshop, we hope to add more open scientific resources to CKAN, which is something we’ve blogged about in the past. Details of the workshop are as follows: When: Saturday 8th […]
We are pleased to announce a workshop on ‘Finding and Re-using Public Information’, co-organised with the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), the Power of Information (POI) Taskforce and mySociety. Details are as follows: When: Saturday 1st November 2008, 1030-1600 Where: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, London, WC1N 3QS. (See map.) Wiki: http://okfn.org/wiki/PublicInformation Participation: […]
GISTEMP is a crucial open data set, because it contains the historical global temperature record. Not very important right now, but in the medium term absolutely vital for the continuing functioning of our society given the likelihood of adverse climate change. Stations that measure temperature naturally do so at specific points in space, and the […]
One of the active Open Knowledge Foundation projects is Open Economics. A substantial part of that effort ends up being data acquisition and ‘cleaning’: getting hold of economic data, parsing it into (computer) usable form and adding it to the Store. (Wouldn’t it be nice if that data was already nicely packaged up or at […]
Hjalmar Gislason recently wrote to us to tell us about an initiative to open up material from the Icelandic government and other public institutions. In The Case for Open Access to Public Sector Data he writes: In these public data collections lies tremendous value. The data that has been collected for taxpayers’ money for decades […]
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 […]
Melanie Dulong de Rosnay recently published an excellent paper on open data in the life sciences in Nature Precedings entitled Check Your Data Freedom: A Taxonomy to Assess Life Science Database Openness. From the abstract: Molecular biology data are subject to terms of use that vary widely between databases and curating institutions. This research presents […]
Last week I went to the Institut d’Estudis Catalans in Barcelona for the Euroscience Open Forum Satellite Event organised by Science Commons. The event brought together together lawyers, scientists, policy makers, stakeholders and representatives from many different groups and organisations interested in open access and open data in scientific research from across Europe. The event […]
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 […]
The first Open Visualisation Workshop took place on Saturday as we mentioned last week. Details, notes and links are available on the event’s wiki page. The event took place at Trampoline Systems’ new site in East London. To make sure the event was as informal as it was billed to be – we left the […]
Bret Taylor’s recent post entitled “We Need a Wikipedia for Data” has been garnering a lot of attention around the blogosphere. While his suggestions are not particularly novel, the post and the attention it has garnered, is, I think, indicative of the growing interests in the issues of (open) data and its importance for the […]
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 — […]
Given the public role of libraries and the fact that bibliographic metadata (i.e. the material in library catalogues) doesn’t seem that exciting from a commercial point of view you might think that, of all the types of data out there, it would be bibliographic data that would be the most open. You might even think, […]
Yesterday Creative Commons announced that their Attribution and Attribution Sharealike licenses will feature a seal of approval and link to Freedom Defined – the Definition of Free Cultural Works. We’ve been in touch with Freedom Defined since May 2006 (we blogged about the project last year) as their aims are so similar to that of […]
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 […]
Sometimes you find some data whose lack of freedom is totally mysterious from a commercial point of view. At mySociety, we recently released made some travel time maps which help you work out where you should live that would have the quickest commute to your place work. Interactive flash sliders to balance this delicate equation […]
Andrew Vickers, a biostatistician at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, recently published an article in the New York Times about his experiences trying to get hold of raw data for cancer research: Cancer Data? Sorry, Can’t Have It. In it he describes various difficulties he has encountered trying to get hold of the […]
On Saturday I attended a ‘BarCamp’ on the Power of Information Review Recommendation 8 – which suggests there should be a re-use request service for UK Public Sector Information (we blogged about this in October). The event was organised by John Sheridan of the Office of Public Sector Information and was attended by representatives from […]
A couple of weeks back we blogged about the ‘Future of Bibliographic Control’ draft report from a working group at the Library of Congress. Since then, we’ve submitted to the group a brief, collaboratively edited response to the draft and an appendix with some additional detailed comments. The response was drafted by the Open Knowledge […]
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 […]
Last week the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control at the Library of Congress released their Draft Report. They are soliciting for public comment until the 15th December, in good time for final submission on the 9th January. The aim of the working group is to: Present findings on how bibliographic control and […]
We’ve recently started looking into how much environmental data made available on the web is open in accordance with the Open Knowledge Definition. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has a Data Distribution Centre (DDC) – which is a good start to see what data is available. The DDC “offers access to baseline and […]
We’ve written about the pleiades project a couple of times before: Organized by the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U.S.A., Pleiades brings together a global community of scholars, students and enthusiasts to expand and enhance continually the information originally brought together by the Classical Atlas Project (1988-2000) […]
My last post here, Google vs. Facebook, was about how our own personal knowledge, that you’ve put into social networks like Facebook or MySpace, should also be open. By this I mean that you should have control of it, and it should be encoded in open formats with open protocols. The last week there’s been […]
British History Online is a site created and run by Institute for Historical Research (part of the University of London I believe) and the History of Parliament Trust and located at: (note the ‘ac.uk’ domain name signifying the official academic status though rather unusually they do run ads). Their purpose is clearly stated on the […]
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 […]
As some of you will know, Public Domain Works, a joint initiative of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Free Culture UK and the Open Rights Group, had its alpha launch back in August. The Public Domain Works Database is an open registry of artistic works that are in the public domain. Since the project was first […]
Facebook has striken fear not only into the hearts of incumbent dot-com billionaires, but also into the hearts of open data freaks. It’s terrifying me – not least, because I use it. I give the most personal, sensitive information that I have to a private US corporation. I have no way of getting the data […]
WorldMapper produces a whole variety of illuminating cartograms to show the distribution of various statistics across the world from royalties to the level of military spending. While looking at the site I immediately started to wonder about the openness both of the maps themselves and the underlying data (to my mind while the maps are […]
The people behind AMEE, the ‘world’s energy meter’ (which we blogged about back in May), have been busy forging ahead into new areas of open service development. As well as ensuring AMEE conforms to the draft Open Service Definition (in short, open data plus open software) they’ve recently published a Memorandum of Understanding with terms […]
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 […]
DBpedia recently released the new version of their dataset. The project aims to extract structured information from Wikipedia so that this can be queried like a database. On their blog they say: The renewed DBpedia dataset describes 1,950,000 “thingsâ€, including at least 80,000 persons, 70,000 places, 35,000 music albums, 12,000 films. It contains 657,000 links […]
As some of you many have seen, Open Knowledge Foundation advisory board members Peter Suber and John Wilbanks recently wrote two interesting articles in CTWatch Quarterly. Peter Suber’s Trends Favoring Open Access is a broad-ranging overview of developments in publishing, research, and technology that look to support Open Access. As well as looking at how […]
The Internet Archive has recently launched a beta version of The Open Library. A demo can be found here and the Open Library book can be read here. It is inspired by the idea of a “library that makes all the published works of humankind available to everyone in the world”. Initially it will consist […]
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, […]
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