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Great News for Open Government Data in the UK
Today, in a speech on “Building Britain’s Digital Future”, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced wide-ranging plans to open up UK government data. In addition to a general promise to extend the existing commitments to “make public data public” the PM announced: The opening up of a large and important set of transport data (the […]
Read moreA free software model for open knowledge
Notes describing the talk on the work of the Open Knowledge Foundation given last week at Jornadas SIG Libre. I was happily surprised to be asked to give this open knowledge talk at an open source software conference. But it makes sense – the free software movement has created the conditions in which an open […]
Read moreResponse to the consultation on opening access to Ordnance Survey data
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, founded in 2006 is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2004 and dedicated to promoting open knowledge in all its forms. What follows is […]
Read moreThe cake test of freedom
At last week’s Jornadas SIG Libre in Girona, Ivan Sanchez of the Spanish OpenStreetmap community told me about the cake test of data freedom. What is the cake test? Easy: geographic data, or a map, is open only if someone can make you a gift of a cake with your map on it. The cake […]
Read moreLibraries in Cologne open up bibliographic data!
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 […]
Read moreOpen Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 14
Welcome to the fourteenth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! For a plain text version for email, please see Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 14 – on our main okfn-announce list OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 14 Contents: Mapping open government data around the world Launch of the Panton Principles for open data in science Where Does […]
Read moreTalking at Open Up the City in Helsinki
This Thursday (11th March) I’m speaking at the Forum Virium’s Open Up the City event in Helsinki. This year their focus is on “open data, design, interfaces and innovation” and I’m speaking under the title “Open Data: What, Why, How?”. It looks like this will be a very interesting event and it’s also a chance […]
Read moreOKFNer Jo Walsh Speaking at IV Jornadas de SIG Libre
The IV Jornadas de SIG Libre is taking place this week from the 10th-12th of March in Girona, Spain. This is the premier spanish F/OSS GIS event and OKFNer Jo Walsh will be speaking: http://www.sigte.udg.edu/jornadassiglibre/keynotes
Read moreNew working group on open bibliographic data!
In the past few weeks there have been a number of developments related to opening up bibliographic metadata. At the end of January we blogged about CERN opening up their library data. Just recently Ghent University Library have published their data under an open license (see ugent_biblio and ugent_catalog) – which is excellent news! At […]
Read moreOpen Data in Archaeology
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 […]
Read moreA tour of climate data at CKAN
The following guest post is by David Jones who is, among other things, a curator of the climate data group on CKAN (the OKF’s open source registry of open data) and co-founder of Clear Climate Code (which was previously featured on our blog here and here). Take a tour of some of the additions we’ve […]
Read moreIntroducing Datapkg: A Tool for Distributing, Discovering and Installing Data “Packages”
Datapkg 0.5 has been released! This is the first release deemed suitable for public consumption (though we are still in alpha)! This announce therefore serves as both introduction and release announcement. Introduction From the docs: datapkg is an user tool for distributing, discovering and installing data (and content) ‘packages’. datapkg is a simple way to […]
Read moreThe Hunt For COINS
I’ve been investigating data for use in the project ‘Where Does My Money Go’. One of the first reports we looked at was the Public Expenditure Statistical Analysis (PESA) — it looks like this:
http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype/
So an obvious question is where does the data in the PESA report come from, I mean, where is the PESA data stored?
Read moreLaunch of the Panton Principles for Open Data in Science and ‘Is It Open Data?’ Web Service
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 […]
Read moreOpen government data in Norway: mounting interest but no breakthrough yet
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 […]
Read moreMapping open government data initiatives around the world
The Open Knowledge Foundation and Access Info are currently seeking information on open government data initiatives around the world, as part of a scoping paper supported by the Open Society Institute: With major announcements from the UK and and the US in the past few months, and numerous open government data catalogues popping up around […]
Read moreOpen data on international development: let us know what you think!
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: […]
Read moreCKAN 0.11 Released
We are pleased to announce the release of version 0.11 of the CKAN software, our open source registry of open data used in ckan.net and data.gov.uk. This is our biggest release so far (55 tickets) with lots of new features and improvements. This release also saw a major new production deployment with the CKAN software […]
Read moreInterested in making an open data catalogue? Virtual meeting on 11th February 2010
We’ve been working hard to set up instances of CKAN for open government data – most notably in data.gov.uk but also for open government data in Germany, France, Canada and elsewhere. We are currently soliciting for feedback on how we can improve CKAN’s user interface and for suggestions for new features. We’re also in touch […]
Read moreBook Search, Museum View, and Exploitation
Read today a Google Books PR piece on the Guardian website. Of out-of-print or hard-to-get books, it says, “Although copies may be available in libraries, they are effectively dead to the wider world.” Also heard today that Google Street View is proposing inside views, museum interiors. Last week, I and some OKF people heard a […]
Read moreRethinking Open Data: Lessons learned from the Open Data front lines
Nat Torkington recently wrote the following piece on O’Reilly Radar. He kindly gave us permission to republish it on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog… In the last year I’ve been involved in two open data projects, Open New Zealand and data.govt.nz. I believe in learning from experience and I’ve seen some signs recently that other […]
Read more7th Communia Workshop, Luxembourg
We recently attended a workshop in Luxembourg as part of Communia, the EU policy network on the digital public domain. There was a focus on bringing together themes from previous events to make a series of policy recommendations to the European Commission (watch this space!). Below are a few notes highlighting some of the talks […]
Read moreCERN opens up bibliographic metadata!
As regular readers of the Open Knowledge Foundation blog will know, bibliographic metadata is a subject close to our heart (see e.g., here, here and here). Hence we were delighted to see today’s announcement that CERN Library are releasing their bibliographic metadata under an open license! From the announcement: Librarians are in general very favourable […]
Read moreClear Climate Code, and Data
The following guest post is by David Jones who is, among other things, a curator of the climate data group on CKAN (the OKF’s open source registry of open data) and co-founder of Clear Climate Code (which we blogged about back in 2008). Clear Climate Code have been working on ccc-gistemp, a project to reimplement […]
Read morePublic Domain Manifesto
On Monday the Public Domain Manifesto went live: http://www.publicdomainmanifesto.org/ From the introductory paragraph: The public domain, as we understand it, is the wealth of information that is free from the barriers to access or reuse usually associated with copyright protection, either because it is free from any copyright protection or because the right holders have […]
Read moreSources of data on data.gov.uk
When data.gov.uk was launched, I had a quick browse around the data, to get a feel for what was in it. Most data sets that I randomly looked at were from statistics.gov.uk (from the Office for National Statistics). Today, I decided to investigate, and work out some basic statistics about the source of the data. […]
Read moreData.gov.uk goes public – and its using CKAN!
Data.gov.uk goes public today, and we’ve very proud that it is using CKAN, our open source registry of open data, to list official UK government datasets (as we announced in October): We’ve been working closely with the Cabinet Office team to get this out the door, and over 2500 datasets have been released via the […]
Read moreOpen data in France: the state of play
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 […]
Read moreOpen Street Map community responds to Haiti crisis
There has recently been a flurry of activity in the Open Street Map community to improve maps of Haiti to assist humanitarian aid organisations responding to the recent earthquake. In particular mappers and developers are scouring satellite images to identify collapsed and damaged buildings/bridges, spontaneous refugee camps, landslides, blocked roads and other damaged infrastructure – […]
Read morePlanning sessions for “Where Does My Money Go?”
Last week we had several planning sessions for our Where Does My Money Go? project – to discuss where to go next and what our priorities will be for the next major release. We had some excellent feedback from the launch of our prototype before Christmas – and the release was covered in the BBC […]
Read moreDraft of an Open Data Commons Attribution License
Yesterday Open Data Commons released a draft of a new attribution license specifically aimed at data and databases. We would warmly welcome feedback on the new draft, and help circulating it to relevant parties (including legal experts, prospective users and so on)! From the announcement: Open Data Commons are happy to announce the first draft […]
Read moreNew open data from London Datastore
As you may well have seen, last Thursday the Greater London Authorities announced the new London Datastore: From the press release: The Mayor of London will unveil plans for the capital’s first open data project which will see large amounts of previously unavailable information from City Hall released online. Similar to the hugely successful ‘Apps […]
Read moreTalk at Chaos Computer Congress on “CKAN: apt-get for the Debian of Data”
Last week OKFNers including myself attended the 26th Chaos Computer Congress (CCC). As previously announced I was giving a talk entitled “CKAN: apt-get for the Debian of Data”. Slides from the talk are now up here: http://m.okfn.org/files/talks/ccc_20091228/ CCC was an amazing experience — a great venue, a great bunch of people and lots of interesting […]
Read moreOpening up UK local spending data
Just before Christmas, the UK Government announced a new report on Making local public expenditure data public, and the development of Local Spending Reports. The report outlines government plans to publish lots more information on where UK public money is spent at local level: It is critical […] that information on public expenditure should be […]
Read morePublic Domain Day 2010: A roundup
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 […]
Read moreDatapkg 0.4 Released
Just in time for demoing at the Chaos Computer Congress (where I’m speaking about Componentization and CKAN), datapkg 0.4 has been released. For those who haven’t heard about datapkg before: datapkg is a tool for distributing, discovering and installing knowledge (data and content) ‘packages’. datapkg is a simple way to ‘package’ data building on existing […]
Read moreSome facts about UK postcodes
Recent BBC news coverage stated that UK postcode data will be made freely available under an open licence from April 2010. Colleagues at EDINA pointed out that some of the coverage assumes that the open data will be the same as that contained in the Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File – but this is uncertain. […]
Read moreOpen Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 13
Welcome to the thirteenth Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter! For a plain text version for email, please see: Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 13 – on our main okfn-announce list Microblog version: RT @jwyg: Open Knowledge Foundation @okfn Newsletter No. 13: http://bit.ly/7CeAfN OPEN KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 13 Contents: Seasons Greetings from the Open Knowledge Foundation! […]
Read moreSeasons Greetings from the Open Knowledge Foundation!
A big Merry Christmas from the Open Knowledge Foundation to all our friends and supporters! In the festive spirit, we’ve put together a few images, texts and audio recordings from various open knowledge projects for your delectation. If you’d have any suggestions for things to add, please let us know in the comments below. See […]
Read moreOKF talking at Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin
Several of us from the Open Knowledge Foundation will be at the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin after Christmas. The 26th Chaos Communication Congress takes place from December 27th to December 30th 2009. OKF Director Rufus Pollock will give a talk on ‘CKAN: apt-get for the Debian of Data‘. If you’re planning to attend, we’d […]
Read moreLarge collection of German texts opened up!
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 […]
Read moreDr Ian Brown joins OKF Board of Directors
We’re very pleased to welcome Dr Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University to the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Board of Directors. Welcome aboard, Ian! http://okfn.org/about/people#DrIanBrown A bit more about Dr Brown: Dr Brown is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at Oxford University. His research is focused on […]
Read moreVisualizar ’09
The project presentations from last month’s Visualizar seminar have now been posted online. This annual event brought together creative teams from a range of disciplines, with the objective of delivering workable presentations using freely available data resources. The theme for 2009 was Public Data – Data In Public. I was fortunate enough to attend on […]
Read moreInterview with Jordan Hatcher on legal tools for open data
The Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Jordan Hatcher was recently interviewed by the Semantic Web Company about Why we can’t use the same open licensing approach for databases as we do for content and software: Legal certainty is crucial when it comes to build business around new technologies. The Open Knowledge Foundation has started to tackle this […]
Read moreWhere Does My Money Go? Prototype Launched
We’re very pleased to announce the first full release of our Where Does My Money Go? prototype. This is now online at: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype Tom Watson MP, commented on the new release: Where Does My Money Go represents another milestone in the UK’s transparency movement. We know that transparency changes individual and institutional behaviour and this […]
Read moreUS Government announces more open government data!
So far its been a good week for open government data (and its only Tuesday)! After yesterday’s announcement from UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, today the US Government’s Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra gave a live webcast from the Whitehouse to announce the release of the new Open Government […]
Read moreUK Government announces lots of new open data!
This morning UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced plans to open up lots more UK Government data! His speech describes plans to put much more detailed information online under open licenses in 2010. This includes: public services performance data – including on crime, hospitals and schools new transport data geospatial data from Ordnance survey (as […]
Read moreClimate Change, Climate Sceptics and Open Data
With the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen starting on Monday, it is of vital important that there is consensus on the scientific evidence about climate change, in order to inform debates about the best course of action for the international community. Sharing the same basic picture about the climate, global warming and the […]
Read moreGlyn Moody and Mark Surman join OKF Advisory Board!
We are very pleased to announce that we now have two new members on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Advisory Board! Glyn Moody, a technology writer and expert on all things open, and Mark Surman, Executive Director at the Mozilla Foundation and one of the founders of Open Everything, have recently joined our prestigious board of […]
Read moreLooking for a design guru to give the Open Knowledge Foundation a makeover!
We’re currently seeking a design guru to give the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s core web presence a makeover. This is a volunteer position, which will involve working closely with the Foundation to integrate and improve its two most high ranking sites: If you are interested in the position, please get in touch on info at okfn […]
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