The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The 1st of January every year is Public Domain Day, when new works enter the public domain in many (though unfortunately not all) countries around the world. To celebrate, the Open Knowledge Foundation is launching the Public Domain Review, a web-based […]
The following guest post is from Stefano Costa at the University of Siena. Stefano is Founder of the IOSA initiative and Coordinator of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology. On December, 10th the COMMUNIA WG3 gathered in Istanbul for the final workshop, with the aim of producing a set of […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Today was the Eurostat Hackday, where coders and designers in several European cities gathered to dig into the Eurostat data, the biggest source of statistical information about Europe and European member states. We met at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in […]
A reminder that this Thursday 16th December is the Eurostat Hackday in a number of European cities, including Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Edinburgh, and London. More information is available at: From the blurb: What is Eurostat? Eurostat is the largest source of statistical information about European member states. It contains detailed comparative information on everything from […]
A report from an EU meeting on the “goals and requirements for a pan-European data portal” is now online (PDF). The meeting took place in Luxembourg last month. Participants included Nigel Shadbolt, one of four members of the UK Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board, and Jose Manuel Alonso, co-lead of the eGovernment Interest Group at […]
The following post is from Melanie Chernoff, Public Policy Manager for Red Hat. It was originally published on opensource.com. Last week, an article in the Wall Street Journal talked about the Open Data Partnership, which “will allow consumers to edit the interests, demographics and other profile information collected about them. It also will allow people […]
A few weeks ago was the first international Open Government Data Camp in London. The event brought hundreds of people interested in open government data from around the world for two days of talks, discussions, planning and coding. You can now find videos, photos, notes and other material from the event online at:
The following guest post is from David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared on eaves.ca. I’m floored. As many of you know, 5 weeks I had a conversation with a group of open data geeks (like me, likely […]
The following guest post is from David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared on eaves.ca. I’m floored. As many of you know, 5 weeks I had a conversation with a group of open data geeks (like me, likely […]
We’re currently organising a ‘hackday’ on the Eurostat data, which will take place on Wednesday 16th December 2010: If you’d like to get involved, please get in touch on the euopendata mailing list, or drop us a line on eurostat at okfn dot org. From the website: Eurostat Hackday What is Eurostat? Eurostat is the […]
A quick note to announce (and celebrate!) the launch of a new community driven French open data catalogue, NosDonnees.fr last Friday in Paris. The catalogue is a joint initiative between the Open Knowledge Foundation and Regards Citoyens. Efforts are currently underway to populate the catalogue with information about French public datasets, including legal information about […]
A brief reminder that this Saturday 4th December is the international open data hackathon! What is it? As says the blurb: It’s a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and […]
The following guest post is from John Wilkin who is Executive Director of the HathiTrust, a Librarian at the University of Michigan and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. In the conversations about openness of bibliographic data, I often find myself in an odd position, vehemently in support of it […]
The following guest post is from Rolf Kleef who is a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Knowledge in Development. It was originally posted here. I just returned from an intense week in the UK: an IKM Emergent workshop in Oxford, and the Open Government Data Camp in London had me almost drowning […]
As you may know the OKF is working on an EU funded project called LOD2. Part of the project aims to bring together openly licensed, machine-readable datasets from local, regional and national public bodies throughout Europe. It will also provide free/open source tools and services for those interested in reusing open government data. We are […]
The JISC funded OpenBib project, of which OKF is a partner, announced last week in collaboration with the British Library the release of 3 million open bibliographic records to the community. This release represents a milestone for open bibliography as it represents the first substantial corpus of bibliographic data to be released in an open […]
The following is a guest blog post from George Oates, Director of the Open Library and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. Open Library is a wiki-editable library catalog, with an open source backend, and a project of the Internet Archive. We like to describe the project as “a […]
We’re very excited to announce that we’re helping to organise an international series of events to convert not-very-useful, unstructured, non-machine-readable sources of public information into nice clean structured data. This will make it much easier for people to reuse the data, whether this is mixing it with other data sources (e.g. different sources of information […]
The folks over at Fish Subsidy (who are also behind the amazing Farm Subsidy project) have just released a new mapping tool to help people find out how €3.4 billion of European fisheries subsidies is spent: This is a great example of reusing European public data to make it easier to understand for citizens, journalists […]
The following guest post is from Aaron Dunn, founder of Musopen and member of the OKF’s Working Group on the Public Domain. Several years ago, I began a small project I called Musopen (derived from Music + Open Source). As a college student, I was confused as to why record labels were suing their own […]
The following guest post is from David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared on eaves.ca. Let’s do it. Last summer, I met Pedro Markun and Daniela Silva at the Mozilla Summit. During the conversation – feeling the drumbeat […]
The following guest post is from Jonathan Van Parijs at the Where’s My Villo? project. The context: bike-sharing schemes, public private partnerships and open data After Paris, Barcelona and a growing number of cities around the world, Brussels inaugurated its bike-sharing scheme in May 2009, called Villo!. By far the most convenient way to travel […]
We’re helping to organise an event (hopefully a series of events!) about data visualisation in Berlin later this November. We started doing workshops on open source visualisation technologies in London a few years ago and hope to pick up with more activity in this area very soon! If you’re interested in keeping in getting involved, […]
The following guest post is from Bart van Leeuwen, a firefighter in the city of Amsterdam who has been experimenting with governmental linked data on Open Street Map to help improve fire truck navigation. Working as a firefighter in the city of Amsterdam, will Linked Open Government Data help me fight fires? Probably not, but […]
The European Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive is intended to make it easier for everyone to find and reuse information produced by public bodies. The European Commission’s recognition of the value of PSI dates back to at least the late 1990s, well before the more recent wave of interest in open government data. The EC […]
Open Acccess journalist extraordinaire Richard Poynder recently interviewed the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Jordan Hatcher about data licensing, the public domain, and lots more. An excerpt is reproduced below. The full version is available on Richard’s website. Over the past twenty years or so we have seen a rising tide of alternative copyright licences emerge — […]
The following guest post is from Stefan Urbanek, an independent consultant, analyst, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data. You can meet him in person at Open Government Data Camp in London this November! Introduction “The Ministry of Defense of the Slovak Republic is a government department which is […]
Every year on January 1st hundreds of works enter the public domain around the world. So how do we know which works will come of age in 2011? Like last year we are keen to get a picture of this well in advance so we can start planning celebrations for Public Domain Day 2011 (see […]
Last week I sat down with Primavera De Filippi, our new coordinator for the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain and we edited some footage we had shot at a meeting a while ago into a microshort film about the Public Domain Calculators. Public Domain Calculators from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo. […]
Just spotted this on the New Zealand open government data ‘ninjas’ list. Why have principles when you can have poems? ;-) The Zen of Open Data, by Chris McDowall Open is better than closed. Transparent is better than opaque. Simple is better than complex. Accessible is better than inaccessible. Sharing is better than hoarding. Linked […]
Last Thursday we had a Workshop on Open Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain in Berlin (as we blogged about here and here). It was a great opportunity for movers and shakers from the world of open bibliographic data to meet in person, and to discuss various projects, policies, standards and initiatives relating to making […]
Following is an interview with Hugh McGuire, Founder of the Librivox project and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain. Could you tell us a bit about the project and its background? Why did you start it? When? What was the need at the time? There were some philosophical reasons, […]
So far it has a great week for open bibliographic data fans! Yesterday Konstanz University Library relicensed their data under CC0, as reported by Adrian Pohl, Coordinator of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data: Mathias Schindler today tweeted that the University Library Konstanz eventually published its data under CC-0. This is the first […]
A brief reminder that our workshop on Open Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain (which we blogged about a few months ago) is taking place on Thursday 7th October. Details are as follows: Where? Rooms 108/108a, FU Berlin, Garystr. 21, 14195 Berlin When? Thursday 7th October 2010 Registration? http://publicdomain.eventbrite.com/ Hashtag? #pdobd Notes? http://okfnpad.org/pdobd Here’s the […]
We’re delighted to announce that our friends at the Open Data Network and OKF Deutschland last week released some work that they have been doing to collate and visualise information related to public spending in Germany: Infosthetics broke the news: Offener Haushalt [offenerhaushalt.de] (German for ‘open budget’) is another demonstration of the large potential behind […]
This weekend, following hot on the heels of the Government 2.0 Camp, members of the Foundation’s Working Group on EU Open Data will be meeting up in person for a 2-day book sprint to create an Open Data Manual. Full details on the wiki page: http://wiki.okfn.org/Open_Data_Manual More background from Ton Zijlstra’s notice on EPSI Platform: […]
The following guest post is from Janneke Adema, researcher in the department of media and communications at the University of Coventry, member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology and coordinator of the OKF Working Group on Open Resources in the Humanities. Archaeological data are currently exposed as an appendix […]
The following guest post is from Francis Bacon, member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Knowledge in Development and blogger at Pop Goes the Weasel. A few weeks ago I received a large brown envelope in the post. It contained a letter, written in reply to a complaint I had made. And […]
The following guest post is from Claudio Artusio, who works for the LAPSI and EVPSI projects. Information generated and collected by public sector bodies represents a veritable gold mine: optimal access to and reuse of this public sector information (PSI) has a positive impact on market services improvements, but also on the democratic involvement of […]
We’re pleased to announce that a new report on access to information and open government data is open for consultation! From the announcement: Access Info Europe and the Open Knowledge Foundation, in collaboration with the Open Society Institute Information Program, are holding a public consultation on open government data and the right of access to […]
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 […]
An announcement about the newly formed OKFN open heritage working group – Supporting open access to out cultural heritage.
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 […]
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 […]
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 – […]
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 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 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 blog is from Open Context’s Project Lead Eric Kansa and Editor Sarah Whitcher Kansa, who are both members of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology. About Open Context Open Context is a free, open access resource for the electronic publication of primary field research from archaeology and […]
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