We are pleased to announce a one day workshop on Open Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain. Details are as follows: Where? Rooms 108/108a, FU Berlin, Garystr. 21, 14195 Berlin When? 7th October 2010 Registration? http://publicdomain.eventbrite.com/ Hashtag? #pdobd Notes? http://okfnpad.org/pdobd Here’s the blurb: This one day workshop will focus on open bibliographic data and the […]
The following guest post is from Stephen Hilton, Programme Lead of the Connecting Bristol initiative. Unusually perhaps, for a city council, we recognise and relish the fact that our city is a quirky, unorthodox, hot-bed of creative digital activity and activism. Bristol City Council has been promoting local e-democracy for the last decade. And it […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation is organising an international workshop on open government data, which will take place in London this autumn: You can register at: From the announcement: What is it? Basic details are as follows: What? A two day workshop for people interested in open government data. When? 18-19th November 2010 Where? University of […]
In the grand tradition of W3C IRC bots, I’ve started some speculative work on a robot that tries to understand natural language descriptions of works and their authors and generates RDF. It is written in Python and uses ORDF, the NLTK and FuXi. Before going into implementation details, here’s an example of a session: 12:41 < […]
Today the New Zealand Government announced the NZGOAL framework for opening up material published by public bodies: The New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework (NZGOAL) was approved by Cabinet on 5 July 2010 as government guidance for State Services agencies to follow when releasing copyright works and non-copyright material for re-use by third […]
A few weeks back we blogged about Russ Nelson’s proposals for the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to adopt the Open Knowledge Definition, our standard for openness in relation to content and data. Russ has written back to us with some notes and questions from a session on this at OSCON: Okay, so, as promised, here […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on EU Open Data is organising a session on linked data and open data at the ICT2010 event in Brussels later this year. Where? T 003, Brussels Expo When? 11:00-12:30 CET, 28th September 2010 From the blurb: This networking session will discuss how public access to government data – […]
The following guest post is from David Kane, who is a research officer at NCVO. He blogs on NCVO’s website and can be found on twitter @kanedr. The author wishes to acknowledge Louise Brown from NCVO’s ICT and Collaboration Team for her valuable input. Here at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) we’ve recently […]
The following interview was published earlier this week by the European Journalism Centre in the Netherlands. In recent years the practice and philosophy of making data freely available for use and re-use has been taken up by many different institutions, from national governments to international organizations such as the World Bank. Journalists too have started […]
We’ve just added a Belarusian translation of the Open Knowledge Definition thanks to Patricia Clausnitzer! http://www.opendefinition.org/okd/bielaruskaja/ 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).
I’m very much looking forward to an event on Data Driven Journalism in Amsterdam in late August, which will bring together representatives from various media organisations (e.g. The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Times, …) and other stakeholders for a day of talks and discussions on the role of new digital technologies in […]
Peter Murray-Rust — Cambridge University chemist, Open Knowledge Foundation Advisory Board member and tireless advocate for open data in chemistry — has recently started a series of blog posts about open data, focusing on issues related to the Panton Principles for open data in science. The first is called Open Data: why I need the […]
The following guest post is from Holger Drewes, who is a member of Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and the Open Data Network in Berlin. As interfaces for open datasets from political and societal institutions become more and more available, the possibilities for easy and uncomplicated data visualization are expanding in very promising ways. With a […]
The following guest post is from Elizabeth McVay Greene, Founder of Food+Tech Connect. It was originally posted on Food+Tech Connect, Provenance and the Huffington Post. The farmer usually knows best — for his or her land, crop, livestock, and profitability, among other things. As a girl on a Minnesota farm in the ’80s and ’90s, […]
The following guest post is from Katleen Janssen, researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Groups on EU Open Data and Open Government Data. In Belgium – and I can imagine this is the case in more countries – we look […]
The following guest post is from Christopher Gutteridge, Web Projects Manager at the Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton and member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. We announced on Tuesday (13th July 2010) that all the RDF made available about our school would be placed in the public domain. […]
Russ Nelson, License Approval Chair at the Open Source Initiative (OSI), recently proposed a session at OSCON about OSI adopting a definition for open data: I’m running a BOF at OSCON on Wednesday night July 21st at 7PM, with the declared purpose of adopting an Open Source Definition for Open Data. Safe enough to say […]
The following guest post is from Sheila MacNeill, Assistant Director of the JISC CETIS project. The Semantic Web, open data, linked data. These phrases are becoming increasingly commonly used in terms of web developments and information architectures. But what do they really mean? Are they, can they be, relevant to education? To help begin to […]
The following article was originally published on the Guardian Datablog by Lisa Evans, the Lead Researcher on the OKF’s Where Does My Money Go? project. We thought we were getting everything with the COINS release. In fact we were missing the best part of all: the Whole of Government Accounts. Before he became chancellor George […]
The following guest post is from Stefano Costa at the University of Siena. He is Founder of the IOSA initiative and Coordinator of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology. Stefano wishes to thank Thomas Kluyver and David Jones for their help in reviewing the post. Since the 19th century, the […]
The following guest post is from Ivan Begtin, who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on Open Government Data. I would like to announce new open data project on Russian government spending… Background Russian Federal Law – 94-FZ of 21.07.2005 declared that Russian Federal Treasury and Russian regional procurement agencies should […]
Last week I participated in the third (and sadly final!) conference of Communia project, a European thematic network on the digital public domain. The theme of this conference was University and Cyberspace and several of the talks articulated a vision in which universities, academics, and students play a key role in creating, curating and promoting […]
The good folks at Scraperwiki are organising an event for developers and journalists later this month in Birmingham, UK. Great to see them helping to connect the dots between people who build things with datasets and those who can help to put the data into context! You can sign up at: From the announcement: What? […]
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 rise of Open Data in the last 3-4 years is no news to anybody reading this blog. More and more public organizations are […]
The following guest post is from Chris Taggart of OpenlyLocal, who advises the Where Does My Money Go? project on local spending data, and is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on Open Government Data. This is a cross-post — Chris’ original post here. When the coalition announced that councils would have […]
The following article is from Guardian columnist Dr Ben Goldacre and was originally published on his blog as “Nullius in verba. In verba? Nullius!”. He kindly allowed us to reprint it here. It discusses the pros and cons of publishing data in the context of investigative medical journalism. Ben Goldacre, Not In The Guardian, Saturday […]
The following guest post is from Christiane Fellbaum at Princeton University who is working on a statistical picture of how words are related to each other as part of the WordNet project. Information retrieval, document summarization and machine translation are among the many applications that require automatic processing of natural language. Human language is amazingly […]
Open Knowledge Foundation Director Rufus Pollock has been interviewed by the Guardian in the run up to its Activate Summit 2010 which will take place on Thursday. From the interview: How, in your experience, have web technologies been employed to make the world a better place? The internet and new digital technologies have had and […]
Open Data Commons has released a new Open Data Commons attribution license (ODC-By). Jordan Hatcher, Chair of the Open Data Commons Advisory Council, writes: Thanks to everyone for their feedback on the licenses and their help with the project. We can now announce a new license to the Open Data Commons family, the ODC Attribution […]
It is sometimes suggested that there isn’t a real difference in terms of “openness” between share-alike (SA) and non-commercial (NC) clauses — both being some restriction on what the user of that material can do, and, as such, a step away from openness. This is not true. A meaningful distinction can be drawn between share-alike […]
We are delighted to announce that the authors of the Panton Principles have been awarded the SPARC Innovator prize! The principles are currently maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Data in Science. From the announcement: Science is based on building on, reusing, and openly criticizing the published body of scientific knowledge. […]
The following guest post is from Ivan Begtin, who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on Open Government Data. I would like to give a brief overview of a few projects I have been working on related to open government data in Russia. OpenGovData.ru The first is OpenGovData.ru, which is a […]
The following guest post is from Joseph Jackson, one of the main organisers behind the Open Science Summit. Dear Champions of Open Science, Please join us in gathering stakeholders seeking to liberate our scientific and technological commons to enable a new era of decentralized, distributed innovation. http://opensciencesummit.com/ While there are many great organizations and talented […]
The following guest post is from Iain Hrynaszkiewicz who is Managing Editor at leading open access publisher BioMed Central and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Data in Science. Having already been scooped by some encouraging and eloquent activity in the open data blogosphere here, here, here and here (perhaps […]
The following guest post is from Lance McKee, who is Senior Staff Writer at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on Open Geospatial Data. As the founding outreach director for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and now as senior staff writer for the OGC, I have […]
Something amazing has happened since the government spending recorded in the COINS database was made openly available to everyone. I’m talking about the impressive range of free, and in many cases open source, products to display the COINS data. So far there are COINS search engines from The Guardian and The Open Knowledge Foundation, graphs […]
The following guest post is from David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca, an open data portal powered by our CKAN software that crowdsources the location of open data sets in Canada (Canada has no equivalent of data.gov or data.gov.uk). David is also a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. […]
The following guest post is by Stefano Costa and Federico Morando. Stefano Costa is a researcher at the University of Siena and Coordinator of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology. Federico Morando is Managing Director & Research Fellow at the NEXA Center for Internet & Society and a member of the Working […]
The following guest post is from Iain Hrynaszkiewicz who is Managing Editor at leading open access journal BioMed Central and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Data in Science. All followers of this blog will know that science publishing now goes much beyond the traditional, IMRaD, journal article. As collective […]
The following guest post is from Chris Taggart of OpenlyLocal, who advises the Where Does My Money Go? project on local spending data, and is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on Open Government Data. With a string of announcements this week and the COINS database (the UK’s biggest source of information […]
It’s exciting times right now for people in the UK interested in how public funds are being used. The new government has proposed to publish unprecedented amounts of spending data in unprecedented detail. In the new Coalition Programme for Government (PDF), the PM has committed to the following, which is very similar to the Conservative […]
We’re extremely proud that data.gov.uk – the UK Government’s open data portal – uses CKAN, OKF’s open source registry of open data. In the months in 2009 that led up to the release of data.gov.uk, OKF worked closely with the Cabinet Office to help them realise their vision of making public data publicly available in […]
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. This text was first published as a European Public Sector Information Platform Topic Report on ePSIplatform.eu. A series of promising new initiatives gives reasons to be […]
JJ Abrams, the creator of Lost gave a great talk at TED 2007 themed around “Mystery Boxes”. A Mystery Box is a box of unspecified goods. When you buy a Mystery Box – from a magic shop, as Abrams describes doing with his grandfather as a child, or from a pet store, sweet shop, or […]
The following guest post is from Kate Sahota, one of the people involved in the Warwickshire County Council’s Open Data (which we we blogged about last month). How it all began It seems the key to triggering a successful open data project is to show the people that matter something shiny, like an iPhone, with […]
We’ve done a quick-and-dirty import of the GLA spending data (ckan package) into a Where Does My Money Go Data Store: http://london.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/ For example, here is what they paid to Vodafone: http://london.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/account/c988ca22-214b-47ef-af19-5fd3cfdc781b/postings Big hat-tip to Donovan Hide and scraperwiki who scraped the data into a usable form. It’s running at a different URL from the […]
At the Open Knowledge Foundation we have been working hard to support the development of open data catalogues around the world. The main purpose of these is to make official datasets easy to find and to reuse — whether by researchers, journalists, or web developers building new applications or services for citizens. Work is underway […]
After having a good look at Inspace set up for a talk session, decided to up the maximum capacity, so there’s no longer a waiting list for OKScotland. If you’re planning to attend on Thursday afternoon then please do register now. Here’s the draft OKScotland schedule for the afternoon – note that there is coffee […]
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, […]
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