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Introducing 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 […]
Read morePost-event material from Open Government Data Camp 2010 is now online!
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:
Read moreTurin: Italian Open Data kicks off!
This post was cowritten by Friedrich Lindenberg, CKAN developer, and Stefano Costa, lead of OKF Italia. Driven by the powerful combination of late-night espresso and a room full of italian open data enthusiasts, the Italian instance of CKAN received a major push of new pacchetti dati last thursday in Turin. Most of the data sources […]
Read moreOpendataday & the International Hackathon: What happened. What happens next.
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 […]
Read moreOpendataday & the International Hackathon: What happened. What happens next.
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 […]
Read moreEurostat Hackday, 16th December 2010
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 […]
Read moreLaunch of NosDonnees.fr, a community driven French open data catalogue
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 […]
Read moreOpen Data Hackathon this Saturday 4th December!
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 […]
Read moreCKAN v1.2 Released together with Datapkg v0.7
We’re delighted to announce CKAN v1.2, a new major release of the CKAN software. This is the largest iteration so far with 146 tickets closed and includes some really significant improvements most importantly a new extension/plugin system, SOLR search integration, caching and INSPIRE support (more details below). The extension work is especially significant as it […]
Read moreOpen Bibliographic Data: How Should the Ecosystem Work?
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 […]
Read moreLet’s build a Debian for Development Data
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 […]
Read moreInterested in open government data in Europe?
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 […]
Read moreMilestone for Open Bibliographic Data: British Library Release 3 Million Records
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 […]
Read moreWhere Does My Money Go: 25k Spending Data
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 […]
Read moreWhy Open Government Data Camp matters
Tomorrow morning at 9.30 marks the start of the Open Government Data Camp, the first of it’s kind, and what we hope will be an annual event. People are already arriving from across the world to attend including representatives from the UN, White House and European Commission. But why all the fuss? We spoke to […]
Read moreOpen-Source Annotation Toolkit for Inline, Online Web Annotation
This is a post by Rufus Pollock, a long-time Open Knowledge Foundation member and coordinator of the Open Shakespeare project. We’ve been working on web-annotation — inline, online annotation of web texts — for several years. Our original motivation was to support annotation of texts in http://openshakespeare.org/ so we can collaboratively build up critical notes […]
Read moreOpening up library records at the Open Library
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 […]
Read moreAnnouncing The Big Clean, Spring 2011
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 […]
Read moreNew mapping tool from European Fish Subsidy project
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 […]
Read moreHow we crowdfunded $70k to make public domain recordings of public domain works
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 […]
Read moreLet’s do an International Open Data Hackathon
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 […]
Read moreOpen data in public private partnerships: how citizens can become true watchdogs
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 […]
Read moreDesign Meets Data, Berlin, 29th November 2010
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, […]
Read moreWhere are the cuts in your country?
As you may have seen, last week the OKF launched a new mini project called WhereAreTheCuts.org. Created by by Jordan Hatch and Richard Pope, the site enables UK citizens to find and report spending cuts near them. It had a pretty enthusiastic reception, and was picked up by the Telegraph and several local news sources. […]
Read moreElektrischer Reporter Video on Open Data
This is a post by Rufus Pollock, co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation and a member of the Board. The “Elektrischer Reporter” team in cooperation with the second channel of German television (ZDF) have just released a great video about Open Data. I’m interviewed in it along with Daniel Dietrich (OKFN Germany and Open Data […]
Read moreGetting started with Governmental Linked Open Data
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 […]
Read moreIf you care about public sector information in Europe – speak up now!
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 […]
Read moreRichard Poynder interviews Jordan Hatcher
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 — […]
Read moreOpen Public Procurements Portal of Slovakia
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 […]
Read moreWhich works enter the public domain in 2011?
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 […]
Read moreOpen Licenses vs Public Licenses
The following post is from Jordan Hatcher, a Director at the Open Knowledge Foundation and founder of the Open Data Commons project. It was originally posted on his blog. Let’s face it, we often have a definition problem. It’s critical to distinguish “open licenses” from “public licenses” when discussing IP licensing, especially online — mostly […]
Read moreNew microshort film on the Public Domain Calculators!
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. […]
Read moreThe Zen of Open Data
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 […]
Read moreNotes from Workshop on Open Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain
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 […]
Read moreInterview with Hugh McGuire, Founder of Librivox.org
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, […]
Read moreNew open bibliographic data from Konstanz and Cambridge!
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 […]
Read moreWorkshop on Open Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain, 7th October 2010
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 […]
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