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What was COINS missing? The mystery of the Government’s hidden spending data
The following article was originally published on the Guardian Datablog by Lisa Evans, the Lead Researcher on the OKF’s Where Does My Money Go? project. We thought we were getting everything with the COINS release. In fact we were missing the best part of all: the Whole of Government Accounts. Before he became chancellor George […]
Read morePollen data in the New and Old World
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 […]
Read moreOpen Context
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 […]
Read moreWe Need Distributed Revision/Version Control for Data
In the open data community, we need tools for doing distributed revision/version control for data like the one’s that already exist for code. (Don’t know what I mean by revision control or distributed revision control? Read this) Distributed revision control systems for code, like mercurial and git, have had a massive impact on software development, […]
Read moreOpen data on Russian government spending
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 […]
Read moreA Big Part of COINS was not Published
This is a post by Lisa Evans, lead researcher on Where Does My Money Go?. When I saw the COINS data that was published at the beginning of June, I suspected there was something missing. I had been reading about the Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) — a project to provide a really good detailed overview of […]
Read moreWhat UK government data should be opened up next?
The Telegraph ask Open Knowledge Foundation Director Rufus Pollock and Chris Taggart of OpenlyLocal about what UK government datasets they’d like to see opened up next…
Read moreOpening up European public sector information: two recommendations
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 […]
Read moreHacks and Hackers, Birmingham, 23rd July 2010
The good folks at Scraperwiki are organising an event for developers and journalists later this month in Birmingham, UK. Great to see them helping to connect the dots between people who build things with datasets and those who can help to put the data into context! You can sign up at: From the announcement: What? […]
Read moreThe Business of Open Data
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 […]
Read moreThe Public Domain and the WIPO Development Agenda
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 […]
Read moreThe open spending data that isn’t
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 […]
Read moreBad Science on Open Data
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 […]
Read moreORDF – the OKFN RDF Library
Some months ago we started looking at how we might possibly use an RDF store instead of a SQL database behind data-driven websites — of which OKF has several. The reasons have to do with making the data reuseable in a better way than ad-hoc JSON APIs. As we tend to program in Python and […]
Read moreDebategraph
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 […]
Read moreWordNet: A Large Lexical Database for English
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 […]
Read moreInterview with Rufus Pollock for Guardian Activate event
Open Knowledge Foundation Director Rufus Pollock has been interviewed by the Guardian in the run up to its Activate Summit 2010 which will take place on Thursday. From the interview: How, in your experience, have web technologies been employed to make the world a better place? The internet and new digital technologies have had and […]
Read moreNew UK transparency board and public data principles
On Friday the data.gov.uk team announced the first meeting of a new Public Sector Transparency Board: The Board will drive forward the Government’s transparency agenda, making it a core part of all government business and ensuring that all Whitehall departments meet the new tight deadlines set for releasing key public datasets. In addition, it is […]
Read moreOpen Data Commons – Attribution License released
Open Data Commons has released a new Open Data Commons attribution license (ODC-By). Jordan Hatcher, Chair of the Open Data Commons Advisory Council, writes: Thanks to everyone for their feedback on the licenses and their help with the project. We can now announce a new license to the Open Data Commons family, the ODC Attribution […]
Read moreWhy Share-Alike Licenses are Open but Non-Commercial Ones Aren’t
It is sometimes suggested that there isn’t a real difference in terms of “openness” between share-alike (SA) and non-commercial (NC) clauses — both being some restriction on what the user of that material can do, and, as such, a step away from openness. This is not true. A meaningful distinction can be drawn between share-alike […]
Read morePanton Principle authors win SPARC Innovator prize!
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. […]
Read moreOpen government data in Russia
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 […]
Read moreEmergency Budget, Deficit and Cuts: Visualized
Today in the UK the Conservatives/Liberal Democrat coalition presented their Emergency Budget. Collaborating with David McCandless, Where Does My Money Go? have created a simple visualization to help you understand and contextualise the budget, and answer some basic questions such as: How much impact will the emergency budget have on the £156bn budget deficit? And […]
Read moreOpen Science Summit 2010, July 29-31, Berkeley
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 […]
Read moreSome final – and future – thoughts on the BioMed Central Open Data award
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 […]
Read moreCan You Close the Deficit Gap?
Where Does Your Money Go? challenges you to beat the Chancellor to it before tomorrow’s budget and close the UK’s financial deficit. Will you increase taxes, make cuts or a mix of both? No decision is going to be popular but are some more palatable than others, you decide. More information: Closing the Deficit Gap […]
Read moreOpen Geoprocessing Standards and Open Geospatial Data
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 […]
Read moreConsuming the Transport for London Data
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 […]
Read moreUnderstanding COINS
Something amazing has happened since the government spending recorded in the COINS database was made openly available to everyone. I’m talking about the impressive range of free, and in many cases open source, products to display the COINS data. So far there are COINS search engines from The Guardian and The Open Knowledge Foundation, graphs […]
Read moreOpen Correspondence
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 […]
Read moreLearning from Libraries: The Literacy Challenge of Open Data
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. […]
Read moreLaunch of it.ckan.net for open data in Italy!
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 […]
Read moreDig the new breed, Part III – wrapping it all up
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 […]
Read moreDig the new breed, Part II – open archaeology and ethics
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 […]
Read moreDig the New Breed: How open approaches can empower archaeologists- Part I
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 […]
Read moreBioMed Central Open Data Award: winner to be announced this week!
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 […]
Read moreCOINS: A Users Guide
At 0930 BST today the UK government released the COINS database, one of the biggest sources of information on UK public spending. Open Knowledge Foundation Director Rufus Pollock says: The release of this data marks another milestone in the opening up of public data – in which the UK leads the way. While this is […]
Read moreOpening up government finances
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 […]
Read moreUK Government commits to open up new spending data!
It’s exciting times right now for people in the UK interested in how public funds are being used. The new government has proposed to publish unprecedented amounts of spending data in unprecedented detail. In the new Coalition Programme for Government (PDF), the PM has committed to the following, which is very similar to the Conservative […]
Read moreThe Durationator
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 […]
Read moreOpen government data in the UK, US and further afield: new report
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 […]
Read moreMomentum building for open government data in Norway
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 […]
Read moreIn The Beginning There Were Mystery Boxes
JJ Abrams, the creator of Lost gave a great talk at TED 2007 themed around “Mystery Boxes”. A Mystery Box is a box of unspecified goods. When you buy a Mystery Box – from a magic shop, as Abrams describes doing with his grandfather as a child, or from a pet store, sweet shop, or […]
Read moreHow to open up local data: notes from Warwickshire council
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 […]
Read moreGreater London Authority Spending and Where Does My Money Go
We’ve done a quick-and-dirty import of the GLA spending data (ckan package) into a Where Does My Money Go Data Store: http://london.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/ For example, here is what they paid to Vodafone: http://london.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/account/c988ca22-214b-47ef-af19-5fd3cfdc781b/postings Big hat-tip to Donovan Hide and scraperwiki who scraped the data into a usable form. It’s running at a different URL from the […]
Read moreBibliographica, an Introduction
It’s time to talk a bit about Bibliographica, a new project of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Bibliographica is designed to make it easier for scholars and researchers to share and collect information about work in their field. It provides an open source software platform to create and share semantically rich information about publications, authors and […]
Read morePutting the cuts into context: where is that £6 billion going to come from?
With the UK election over, reductions in public spending are currently at the top of the agenda. Whichever way you cut it, taxpayers and public service users look set to face big changes. The ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ dashboard – a free, interactive online tool from the Open Knowledge Foundation – will help to […]
Read moreCKAN v1.0 Released
We are pleased to announce the availability of version 1.0 of the CKAN software, our open source registry system for datasets (and other resources). After 3 years of development, twelve point releases and a several successful production deployments around the world CKAN has come of age! As well as being used to power http://ckan.net and […]
Read moreConsultation on standard for opening up information on aid funding flows
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 […]
Read morePublic Domain Calculators at Europeana
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 […]
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.