The following post is by Claudio Artusio who works for LAPSI, the European Network on Legal Aspects of Public Sector Information. There is still 3 weeks left to apply to the 3rd LAPSI Award on the most user-friendly design of a PSI portal in the EU (http://www.lapsi-project.eu/news/award3). PSI (acronym for Public Sector Information) can be […]

This guest post by Chris Taggart was originally published on his blog at countculture.wordpress.com. Chris is co-founder of OpenCorporates,  founder of OpenlyLocal, and member of the OKF open government working group  Yesterday I received an email from a Cabinet Office civil servant in preparation for a workshop  tomorrow about the Open Data in Growth Review, and in it I […]

The following guest post is by Thomas Gegenhuber, Naumi Haque and Stefan Pawel, who are involved in Open Commons Linz. In 2010, the City of Linz, Austria completed a year-long study of an “Open Commons Region” for government. The findings of the study introduce a framework for open government, with the goal of creating a […]

The following guest post is by Peter Hicks, IP Network Engineer and Open Transport Data advocate. In the late 1990s, I decided to learn more about why my commute to and from London wasn’t always a smooth process. Having an inquisitive nature, I set about casually talking to people ‘in the know’ – friends inside […]

The following post is by Liliana Bonegru, Project Coordinator at the European Journalism Centre (EJC), and Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The post announces a joint workshop between the EJC and OKF, focusing on how to get started with data-driven reporting on spending data. This workshop will focus particularly on EU […]

The following post is from Friedrich Lindenberg and Stefan Wehrmeyer from OKF Deutschland. Today the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland is launching a new Freedom of Information (FOI) portal called “Frag den Staat”. The new site enables citizens, journalists and researchers to request information from over 830 federal agencies and institutions across Germany. Requests can be […]

The following post is from Mark MacGillivray, who works with the OKF on our Open Bibliography project and other related projects. Today the JISC called for all metadata to be openly accessible, inviting all publicly funded organisations including universities, colleges, libraries, museums and archives to make the same commitment. The OKF is proud to have […]

Thanks to our smashing new designer Kat Braybrooke and the wit and design skills of the community, the OKF now have a new range of T-shirts (including women’s fit and re-adaptations of the old classics!) available via the OKF spreadshirt shop. Congratulations again go to Hans Overbeek for his winning “Yes, we’re Open” design. Thanks […]

The following guest post is from Nagarjuna G. from the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai. Nagarjuna will be joining us at OKCon 2011 for his workshop on metaStudio.org. ###About metaStudio.org is a collaborative workspace for shaping up education and research inspired by free software philosophy and open science. Here we design and […]

The following guest post is from Ivan Begtin, founder of OpenGovData.ru, and member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. I know that not too many people know about Russian open government projects. To be honest we don’t have many of them. But, at the same time, they do exist, and we have […]

The following guest post is by David Osimo, European policy analyst and member of the OKF’s Working Groups on Open Government Data and EU Open Data Who are the civic hackers? What are their motivations and barriers? What impact are government 2.0 initiatives having? And most importantly, what policy choices should the EU make? To […]

In a letter presented to Congress last week, signed by individuals and organisations including the Open Knowledge Foundation, the US government has been urged to restore funding to the Electronic Government Fund, “which provides critical support for the construction of a more transparent and efficient government and serves as a building block for private-sector innovations […]

Want to share your tales of openness with the world? Got a cool project you’d like to tell people about? Or perhaps some interesting ruminations about open knowledge? The OKF blog is a fantastic place to tell your story, open up conversations, and make sure all your hard work is getting noticed. We want to […]

The following guest post is by Cynthia O’Murchu, investigative reporter at the Financial Times, and previously their deputy interactive editor. She is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data At its inception, “Europe’s Hidden Billions”, a joint investigation by the Financial Times and the then newly formed Bureau of […]

As announced on the Where Does My Money Go? blog the UK government has released a new and interesting set of spending data. As Anna Powell-Smith reports: Today, the UK government published its spending items over £25,000. From now on, every month you’ll be able to see just what each central government department spent, with […]

We’re very pleased to see that the Norwegian government will be using our CKAN software, an open-source registry of open data, to build their national data catalogue! From their announcement: During the next few months, data.norge.no will be set up as a national data catalog using CKAN, Drupal, and the integration module used by data.gov.uk. […]

The analogue to an Object-Relational Mapper for RDF. Helping to make OWL Description Logic accessible from Python in a way that will seem familiar to people who are accustomed to things like SQLAlchemy and Django. http://packages.python.org/ordf/odm.html

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 < […]

Inferencing, or machine reasoning has a slightly unsavoury reputation perhaps stemming from the failure of Strong AI and its association with science fiction. This is a bit unfortunate and it could be argued that it has led Semantic Web technologies to be underdeveloped. With the Semantic Web and RDF we are concerned with simple statements, […]

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 […]

Today, in a speech on “Building Britain’s Digital Future”, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced wide-ranging plans to open up UK government data. In addition to a general promise to extend the existing commitments to “make public data public” the PM announced: The opening up of a large and important set of transport data (the […]

Last week OKFNers including myself attended the 26th Chaos Computer Congress (CCC). As previously announced I was giving a talk entitled “CKAN: apt-get for the Debian of Data”. Slides from the talk are now up here: http://m.okfn.org/files/talks/ccc_20091228/ CCC was an amazing experience — a great venue, a great bunch of people and lots of interesting […]

Ernest Maples, a free service providing postcode data which we blogged about in July has recently been taken down due to legal action from the Royal Mail. Harry Metcalfe, one of the directors of the project, writes: On Friday the 2nd October we received correspondence from the Royal Mail demanding that we close this site […]

Open Data Commons have released v1.0 of the Open Database License (ODbL), a share-alike license for data and databases. This is really big news for anyone working on open data as there are very few open data licenses available and none that provide for share-alike. From the announce: We are delighted to announce the release […]