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Building the (Open) Data Ecosystem
The following is a post by Rufus Pollock, co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Present: A One-Way Street At the current time, the basic model for data processing is a “one way street”. Sources of data, such as government, publish data out into the world, where, (if we are lucky) it is processed by […]
Read moreBounties for scrapers: a new approach to opening global data
This is a guest post by Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates.com and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data. On Friday we at OpenCorporates announced an innovative (and frankly untested!) way for the open data community to work together in helping opening up one of the most important datasets there […]
Read moreThe Aid Revolution begins with XML
The following guest post is by Claudia Elliot from Publish What You Fund. IATI XML data After two years of negotiating, the 18 donors of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) agreed on February 9th the final details of a new global standard for publishing aid information. This format makes aid information internationally comparable, and […]
Read moreThe next OGD frontier: Low and middle income countries
The following guest post is by Aman Grewal and Carlos de la Fuente, from the World Wide Web Foundation and CTIC Foundation Last year we witnessed an impressive expansion of Open Government Data initiatives all around the world. We can assert without any doubt that it was clearly the year when Open Government spread throughout […]
Read moreOpen Data Search: finding useful datasets, worldwide
The following post is from Friedrich Lindenberg, who is a developer at the Open Knowledge Foundation working on CKAN, PublicData.eu and Open Spending. Recently, there has hardly been a week in which there hasn’t been an announcement of a new local, regional or national open data initiative – including ever more extensive catalogues of data […]
Read moreOpen Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2011: 30th June & 1st July
The Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010 Call for Participation and Registration is now open! We would be grateful for help in circulating the call to relevant lists and communities! You can reuse or point to: This blog post Main CFP page Plain text announce (bottom of page). Open Knowledge Conference 2011: Call for Participation When? […]
Read moreOpen Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2011: 30th June & 1st July
The Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010 Call for Participation and Registration is now open! We would be grateful for help in circulating the call to relevant lists and communities! You can reuse or point to: This blog post Main CFP page Plain text announce (bottom of page). Open Knowledge Conference 2011: Call for Participation When? […]
Read morePublic Transport Data for Berlin
The following post is from Stefan Wehrmeyer, who has worked on projects such as Mapnificent, and has recently joined the Open Knowledge Foundation as a developer! Public Transport Data is awesome! It’s one of the few datasets that people actually use every day when they ask for the next bus or the fastest route. And […]
Read more“Should Britain flog off the family silver to cut our national debt?”
The following post is from Francis Irving, CEO of ScraperWiki. ‘Should Britain flog off the family silver to cut our national debt?‘ — that’s the question the UK current affairs documentary Dispatches tackled last Monday. ScraperWiki worked with Channel 4 News and Dispatches to make two supporting data visualisations, to help viewers understand what assets […]
Read moreA Kafkaesque Data-trail: the Hunt for “Europe’s Hidden Billions”
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 […]
Read moreThe Public Domain Calculators code is now in a separate library
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. As many of you will know, the Public Domain Calculators aim to make it easier to find out which works are in the public domain in a given jurisdiction. There are two main parts of the project: A collection of flowcharts, […]
Read moreOpen Government Data in Slovakia
The following guest post is by Zuzana Wienk, from the Slovakian watchdog the Fair Play Alliance. She is also a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data When we started to build a data catalogue of all possible flows of public finances to the private sphere in 2003, we had no […]
Read moreProject Gutenberg adds their 40,000th free eBook!
The following guest post is from Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain It’s The Year of the eBook! Project Gutenberg, the granddaddy of all eBook libraries, announced today they have put number 40,000 of internally produced free eBooks online as of March […]
Read moreIntroducing FigShare: a new way to share open scientific data
The following post is from Mark Hahnel, founder of the Science 3.0 network and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Data in Science. Scientific publishing as it stands is an inefficient way to do science on a global scale. A lot of time and money is being wasted by groups around […]
Read moreKeeping Open Government Data Open?
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. An unprecedented amount of freely reusable government information is currently being released by public bodies around the globe. This is being consumed and reused by numerous stakeholders – including civic developers, data literate citizens, data journalists, NGOs, researchers, and companies. There […]
Read moreCityCamp Colorado – gov 2.0 goes local.
The following guest post is from Scott Primeau from Colorado Smart Communities, member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data Just over a year ago, Kevin Curry started the CityCamp movement to bring together local government officials, government employees, private sector technology experts, journalists, and citizens to share perspectives and insights […]
Read moreOpen Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No.16 Sept-Dec 2010
Welcome to the sixteenth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! For a plain text version for email please see Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 16 – on our main okfn-announce list. OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 16 Contents: Open Government Data Camp 2010 Launch of PublicData.eu Europe’s Energy CKAN keeps on growing – new releases, and launch […]
Read moreOpen Data in Brighton and Hove
The following guest post is from Greg Hadfield, a former Fleet Street journalist and internet entrepreneur, and founder of the Open-data Brighton and Hove group. Greg is also director of strategic projects at Cogapp, and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data. Brighton and Hove is a special place. […]
Read moreExperts to underpin Wikipedia’s open wisdom? Turning anecdotes into data.
The following guest post is from Dr Panagiota Alevizou, member of the Wikimedia Research Committee, Research Fellow in Education and Educational Technologies at the Open University, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Science. Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary last January was followed by a frenzy of media coverage in the mainstream and […]
Read moreDataMarket.com Launches with 100 Million Open Data Time Series – remains firmly commited to open data
The following guest post is from Hjalmar Gislason, founder of DataMarket.com, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on EU Open Data. We‘ve just launched an offering of statistics from some of the world’s most important sources of open data on DataMarket.com. This enables users to find, compare, visualize and download statistics from […]
Read moreAs coder is for code, X is for data
For code we have the term coder, as in, “he’s a great coder”, but what do we use when talking about data? datanaut, datar, data wrangler, data hacker, data geek …? Suggestions (and votes) please in a comment or tweet! (@okfn or @rufuspollock) Would also be nice to have equivalents for the many variations that […]
Read moreOpen Bibliographic Data Challenge
What can you do with open access to data? What great ideas do you have for utilising open access to bibliographic catalogues? Or what example prototypes can you come up with? We want to find out! 2 x £50 prizes for great ideas using bibliographic data 2 x £500 prizes for building prototype apps using […]
Read moreThe Open Knowledge Foundation will soon help to run ePSIplatform
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re proud to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation is part of a new team which will take on the maintenance of ePSIplatform project for the next two years. As many of you will know ePSIplatform is a key resource for […]
Read moreNavajo Nation Water Quality Project
The following guest post is by Arlen Parsa, who works for Groundswell Educational Films, an American non-profit. In collaboration with the Northwestern University chemistry department, they’ve produced a brilliant example of how opening up data can have a real impact on people’s lives. ##The problem Many parts of the Navajo Indian reservation in the south-western […]
Read moreHow can we promote the public domain?
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. A few weeks back we ran a small workshop in Berlin for Public Domain Day 2011. It was attended by a mix of artists, scholars, legal experts, technologists, and passers by. We started out with a general conversation in which the […]
Read morePlaying around with Open Linked Data: data.totl.net
The following guest post is by Christopher Gutteridge, a Web & Systems Programmer and Open Data Architect at the University of Southampton. When he was young he wrote the “coffee stain” filter for GIMP, and is the developer of Graphite RDF PHP library & tools. He is a member of the OKF Working Group on […]
Read moreEurope’s Energy: a new mini-app to put the European energy targets into context
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. If you hang around any of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s many mailing lists, or if you follow us (or any of our people) on Twitter you may have noticed that we’ve been quietly working very hard on something recently. That ‘something’ […]
Read moreOpen Shakespeare Annotation Sprint
The following is a guest post by James Harriman-Smith who is coordinator of the Open Shakespeare project. This weekend we’re holding the first Open Shakespeare Annotation Sprint — participate and help change criticism forever! We’ll be getting together online and in-person to collaborate on critically annotating a complete Shakespeare play with all our work being […]
Read moreArt Open Data
The following guest post is by Rob Myers, artist, hacker, writer, and member of the OKF Working Groups on Open Data in the Humanities and Cultural Heritage. Art Open Data is Open Data that concerns art institutions, art history, the art market, or artworks. Using this data, we can examine art history and contemporary art […]
Read moreSupport Yourtopia.net in the Worldbank Apps competition!
The following post is from Guo Xu, economics researcher, member of the OKF’s fledgling Working Group on Open Information in Economics, and member of the Yourtopia project. Two weeks ago, we announced the Yourtopia.net project, a simple web application that allows anyone to say what kind of world, what “YourTopia”, they would like to live in. […]
Read moreOpen Public Data: Then What? – Part 2
The following guest post is by Daniel Kaplan, Director of Fing (the Next-Generation Internet Foundation, France). On Friday he mapped three possible futures for Open Public Data, and today he suggests ways to ensure we will avoid some of the dangers he highlighted. ###What triggers what? One may believe that one of the three scenarios […]
Read moreOpen Public Data: Then What? – Part 1
The following guest post is by Daniel Kaplan, Director of Fing (the Next-Generation Internet Foundation, France). Today he explores three possible futures for Open Public Data, and on Monday he will suggest ways to ensure that we are moving in the best direction. We tend to assume that the opening up of public data will […]
Read morePublishing the OKF Board Minutes
The following is a post by Becky Hogge, a member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors. On behalf of the OKF Board of Directors, today I’ve published summary minutes of OKF Board meetings dating back to May 2009. Minutes from some of the previous meetings, including the Board’s two most important ones, have been online […]
Read morePython Web Expert Jobs
This is a joint post by James Gardner, the lead developer on CKAN and Rufus Pollock, creator of CKAN and project lead for Where Does My Money Go. The Open Knowledge Foundation is looking for really good Python web developers to join our organisation to work on CKAN, our open source web-based catalogue system built […]
Read moreOpen Biblio Principles Announced
The following post is by Mark McGillivrary, a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. Last week the Open Biblio Principles were launched by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. The principles are the product of six months of development and discussion within the working group […]
Read moreIntroducing Our New Project Coordinator: Jason Kitcat
Hello, my name is Jason and I’m OKF’s newest addition to the team. I’m filling a new role at the OKF to keep an overview of live projects, liaise with the Board of Directors and the Coordination Committee plus doing some direct project management. The first major piece of work I’m diving into is OKF’s […]
Read moreIntroducing GetTheData.org: Ask and Answer Data Related Questions
The following post is by Tony Hirst, who has been working with Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge to create http://GetTheData.org/, a new question and answer site for data-related questions. Where can I find a list of airports with their locations? Where can I find historical weather data? How do I find the county from […]
Read moreSpending Stories
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We submitted a proposal for a project called Spending Stories to the Knight News Challenge back in December but in the rush before Christmas we didn’t get a chance to post about here! The News Challenge aims to “advance the future […]
Read moreLaunch of the Principles on Open Bibliographic Data
The following post is from Adrian Pohl, coordinator of the OKFN Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data. Yesterday, the Principles of Open Bibliographic Data were launched at the Peter Murray-Rust symposium “Visions of a (Semantic) Molecular Future”: http://openbiblio.net/principles/ The principles’ main recommendations read as follows: When publishing bibliographic data make an explicit and robust license […]
Read moreOpening up linguistic data at the American National Corpus
The following guest post is from Nancy Ide, Professor of Computer Science at Vassar College, Technical Director of the American National Corpus project and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Linguistic Data. The American National Corpus (ANC) project is creating a collection of texts produced by native speakers of American English […]
Read moreIntroducing Yourtopia.net
The following post is from Dirk Heine, a member of the new OKF Working Group on Economics and a member of the YourTopia.net Today we’re announcing a simple new app (also submitted to World Bank Apps competition) that allows anyone to say what kind of world, what ‘YourTopia’, they would like to live in: http://yourtopia.net/ […]
Read moreWho wants to build an open social bookmarking service?
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. As you may well have heard, in December there were rumours that the Delicious social bookmarking service may be discontinued. This has caused a flurry of activity in the online world to back up bookmarks and to look for alternative similar […]
Read moreBuioMetria Partecipativa
The following is a guest post by Andrea Giacomelli of BuioMetria Partecipativa (Participatory Sky Quality Monitoring), an Italy-based project that is also producing open data. Light pollution is a major issue which concerns not only astronomers and stargazers, but has serious impacts on the environment and human health. The BMP project is an initiative founded […]
Read moreLaunch of the Public Domain Review to celebrate Public Domain Day 2011
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 […]
Read moreCultural Heritage rights in the age of digital copyright
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 […]
Read moreOpenCorporates: the Open Database of the Corporate World
This is a guest post by Chris Taggart, a member of OKFN’s open government working group and creator of OpenlyLocal, who today launched a new website OpenCorporates in collaboration with Rob McKinnon (a project they first demoed at the Open Government Data Camp in November). Why OpenCorporates? Like most open data/open source projects, it was […]
Read moreExploring European Energy Data
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 […]
Read moreReminder: Eurostat Hackday, Thursday 16th December 2010
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 […]
Read moreNotes from EU meeting on “pan-European open data portal”
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 […]
Read moreWhat “open data” means – and what it doesn’t
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 […]
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