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 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 Séverine Dusollier, who is a Professor in Law at the University of Namur and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain. She recently completed a Scoping Study on Copyright and Related Rights and the Public Domain commissioned as part of the WIPO Development […]
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 guest post is from David Price, co-founder of Debategraph, a debate tool for visually representing complex debates. Debategraph provides a novel way for geographically dispersed groups to collaborate in real-time in thinking through complex issues. It does so by enabling groups of any size to externalise, visualize, question, and evaluate all of the […]
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 […]
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 […]
The following guest post is from Julian Todd, who works on projects such as Public Whip, UNdemocracy, and ScraperWiki. He is also a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data.. The post was originally published on Julian’s blog, Freesteel. Yesterday Transport for London made a data dump of various locations […]
The following guest post is from Iain Emsley, who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Resources in the Humanities, and a contributor to the Open Shakespeare and Open Milton projects. Using the social graph, one can find the connections between seemingly disparate groups of people on different services. Most […]
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 […]
This is the third in the amazing series of guest blogs from Ant Beck on the impact of linked open data for archaeology. Part 1: New approaches to archaeological data analysis, as seen in the DART and STAR projects Part 2: Considering the ethics of sharing archaeological knowledge OK, to recap we have: A scientific […]
The second in this great series of three guest blogs by Ant Beck. See Part 1 for applications of linked data and remote sensing in archaeology. Part 3 will wrap things up and talk about the disruptive implications of linked open data for impact of archaeology. Open Science provides the framework for producing transparent and […]
Very happy to post the first in an amazing series of OKFN guest blogs by Ant Beck, a member of the Open Archaeology working group. Ant discusses the DART project and the STAR project, both of which employed Linked Data in a heritage context. Later we’ll get into the ethics of open heritage, and a […]
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 […]
The following guest post is from Professor Townsend Gard and Justin A. Levy who are both at the Tulane Center for Intellectual Property Law and Culture, New Orleans, and are members of the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Working Group on the Public Domain. The Durationator is a project based at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Technical Advisory Group for the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is currently soliciting for comments on a consultation paper about a new standard for opening up data on international development: http://www.iaticonsultation.org/ More on IATI: The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is a new initiative which aims to make information about aid spending easier to […]
The following guest post is from Christina Angelopoulos at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) and Maarten Zeinstra at Nederland Kennisland who are working on building a series of Public Domain Calculators as part of the Europeana project. Both are also members of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain. Over 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 […]
Not so long ago we were in contact with David Eaves, a Canadian public policy analyst and open government data advocate (who advises the Mayor of Vancouver about open data and open government), about starting an catalogue for Canadian open government data. A couple of weeks ago he and a small team of coders and […]
The following guest post is from Andreas Langegger who is at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on EU Open Data. Historically, transparency has never been our strength – let’s shape the future. Transparency and public sector information policy have always been rather infamous topics in Austria. […]
The following post is from David Read, a developer working on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN project. David attended the Greater London Authorities’ Possibilities of Real Time Data conference earlier this week. London’s authorities have opened up lots of their data this year, kicking off in January with the launch of the London Data Store […]
Following is a guest post from Daniel Dietrich, Chairman of the Open Data Network, Official Representative of the Open Knowledge Foundation in Germany and Researcher at the centre for Computers and Society at the Technical University Berlin. In this post I will try to give you an overview and update on what is happening on open […]
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. At the government data project at the University of Bergen, we see the Norwegian language version of CKAN, launched this week, as a significant step on […]
The following guest post is from John Mark Ockerbloom, library scientist at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and editor of The Online Books Page. He blogs at Everybody’s Libraries. I’ve recently gotten involved with two Open Knowledge Foundation working groups, one on open bibliographic data and one on identifying public domain materials. Folks who follow […]
Subsequent to the recent consultation on Ordnance Survey data and Gordon Brown’s commitment to opening up (an unspecified amount of) the data in a speech last week – today the UK’s mapping agency is releasing a significant portion of their data for free use by the public. More information is available in the following report, […]
The Open Knowledge Foundation has a keen interest in opening up data on international development – from our international development panel at OKCon 2009, to our recent report on unlocking aid information, to our working group on open knowledge in development. Hence we are delighted to be co-organising the Aid Information Challenge, along withAid Info, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
January 1st 2010 was Public Domain Day, when around the world various works fell out of copyright and into the public domain. Back in November we put together a rough list of which works fall into the public domain: You can find the list of 563 authors on our Public Domain Works project, which is […]
We’re very pleased to see that a large collection of German language digital texts has just been released under an open license. Yesterday, it was announced that Wikimedia Germany, Creative Commons Germany and TextGrid are releasing a large collection of “culturally valuable” texts either in the public domain or under a CC-BY license, which is […]
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 meeting about building a set of Public Domain Calculators for countries across Europe (which we blogged about earlier this month). The public domain calculators will help to determine whether or not a given work is in copyright in a given jurisdiction. We started out by reviewing existing work on the […]
There is often a tendency to talk of ‘the public domain’ and of works falling out of copyright and ‘into the public domain’ – as though there is a single set of works which are out of copyright all over the world. In fact, of course, there are different national laws about the nature and […]
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 […]
Opengov.se is a registry of open government data in Sweden: Opengov.se is an initiative to highlight available public datasets in Sweden. It contains a commentable catalog of government datasets, their formats and usage restrictions. It makes a note of what percentage of the datasets are fully open – i.e. material that is free for anyone […]
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