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OKFestival Call for Proposals Released With a Twist
For those looking for a reason to come to Helsinki with us this fall, the OKFestival Call for Proposals is released today – and it has an experimental, innovative focus. The spin? For this year’s OKFestival (the first event of its kind, organised almost entirely through virtual conference calls, IRC chats and co-written documents by […]
Read moreIntroducing the DataStore
A major new feature in the DataHub is good news for data wranglers. The DataStore allows users to store and load structured data into a database, where it can be queried, filtered, or accessed from other programs via a rich data API. The API is also used by CKAN’s inbuilt Recline Data Explorer, giving in-page […]
Read moreEuropeana and Linked Open Data
Europeana has recently released a new version of its Linked Data Pilot, data.europeana.eu. We now publish data for 2.4 million objects under an open metadata licence: CC0, the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. This post elaborates on this earlier one by Naomi Lillie on the Open Biblio site. Linked Open Data from europeana on Vimeo. […]
Read moreTHATCamping in Luxembourg
THATCamps (The Humanities And Technology Camps) are a form of “unconference” focussed on the nascent discipline of the Digital Humanities that have risen rapidly in popularity since their invention by the folks over at George Mason University. I was lucky enough to be one of 50 participants at this year’s first THATCamp in Europe which […]
Read moreEurope’s Energy wins a Silver Award at Malofiej 20
This post is cross-posted from jonathangray.org. Europe’s Energy, a project I helped to create to put EU energy targets into context, has just won a Silver Award at Malofiej 20. The Malofiej Awards recognise innovative infographics from around the world: The Malofiej Awards have since 1993 given recognition to the best infographics published in print […]
Read moreePSI Platform Conference 2012
On Friday the 16th of March, the European Public Service Information (ePSI) Platform conference was held in Rotterdam. More than 300 guests from all over the world gathered for what turned out to be a very busy and interesting day. In 15 sessions 60 speakers gave an overview on a wide variety of open data […]
Read moreThe School of Data Journalism is coming soon!
This article is cross posted on DataDrivenJournalism.net </p> The School of Data Journalism is a series of panel discussions and workshops on various aspects of data journalism organised by the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is hosted at the sixth edition of Italy's leading journalism event, the International Journalism Festival in […]
Read moreBuilding the Ecology of Libraries – An Interview with Brewster Kahle
This interview is cross-posted here and on the Open GLAM blog. At OKCon 2011, we had the opportunity to interview Brewster Kahle who is a computer engineer, internet entrepreneur, activist, and digital librarian. He is the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of “universal access to […]
Read moreLOD2 plenary, Vienna, 21-3 March 2012
I am in Vienna, along with my colleague Ira, for a plenary meeting of the assorted partners of the LOD2 project. LOD2 is an EU-funded research project on Linked Open Data, the vision of an interlinked web of data known to many from Tim Berners-Lee’s TED talk. The meeting runs for 3 days, in which […]
Read moreMapping the Republic of Letters
The following post is crossposted from the OpenGLAM blog, and is about Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters Project – one of the finest examples of what can be done with cultural heritage data and open source tools. Mapping the Republic of Letters is a collaborative, interdisciplinary humanities research project looking at 17th and 18th […]
Read moreWill technology boost the fight against corruption in the Post-Soviet region?
Having come across the recent UNDP study on the role of social media for enhancing public transparency and accountability in Eastern Europe (download here), one cannot help feeling optimistic about the potential to raise the level of civic empowerment and to fight corruption in the post-Soviet countries. Looks like the Transparency Works event jointly organized […]
Read moreTechnology for Fiscal Transparency – Where Next?
Who is using technology to follow the money? The hunt is on… Over the last month, we have been working on a report entitled “Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance” for the Global Initiative on Fiscal Transparency. We are hoping to identify the most promising projects around the world that are using technology (web, […]
Read moreOpen Knowledge Foundation Newsletter January – March 2012
We've hit the new year running here at the Open Knowledge Foundation! Our work is expanding in every dimension, with new groups and chapters popping up all over the world, new projects and initiatives constantly emerging, and existing projects growing. But the most crucial aspect of this growth is making sure more people are being […]
Read moreAnnouncing DM2E: Exploring the possibilities of Linked Open Data in cultural heritage
The Open Knowledge Foundation is delighted to announce that it will be leading the community work for a three-year EU funded project entitled Digitised Manuscripts to Europena (DM2E). The project consortium, which includes academic institutions, NGOs and commercial partners, will be led by Professor Stefan Gradmann at the Humboldt University. ##Europeana The project aims to […]
Read moreApplying Austrian Open Data Experiences in the Czech Republic
Open data in Austria enjoys support from various levels of the public administration, and as a result Austria is one step ahead of the Czech Republic. Last month, we held a seminar to learn from each other’s experiences. Austrian initiatives promoting greater openness of government data, such as the Open Knowledge Forum Österreich, have managed […]
Read more#OpenDataEDB: the results
Last night was the first OKFN Meet-Up in Scotland* at the Ghillie Dhu, Edinburgh, run in collaboration with DevCSI. 19 people attended from around the city and nearby, including Glasgow, and those visiting for the Open Biblio Sprint represented Cambridge, London, Wolverhampton and the Netherlands. The Auditorium was a beautiful venue, and there was a […]
Read moreEnergy and Climate Post-Hack News
Earlier this month, our Energy and Climate Hackday brought together about 50 people in London and online, joining from Berlin, Washington D.C., Amsterdam, Graz and Bogota. With participants working in the private sector, for NGOs, universities and the public sector, we had a good mix of people with different expertise and skills. Some people had […]
Read moreFrom CMS to DMS: C is for Content, D is for Data
This is a joint blog post by Francis Irving, CEO of ScraperWiki, and Rufus Pollock, Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation. It’s being cross-posted to both blogs. Content Management Systems, remember those? It’s 1994. You haven’t heard of the World Wide Web yet. Your brother goes to a top university. He once overheard some geeks […]
Read moreOpen Plaques: Community Powered Heritage
This is a shortened version of a post from the OpenGLAM blog, where you can keep up-to-date with goings-on around open data in heritage and arts. Historical plaques by their very nature are objects in the public domain, so creating a platform to collect them with the public – and for the collected data to […]
Read moreLiving Labs Global Award 2012 – Two Open Knowledge Foundation Projects Nominated
Two projects of the Open Knowledge Foundation have been nominated for the Living Labs Global Award 2012: OpenSpending.mobi – Participatory budgeting through augmented reality and CityData – Making Cities Smarter – A central entry point to all your city’s data. Out of nearly 700 submitted showcases, about 15% have been selected to submit an extended […]
Read moreScotland’s first Meet-up is next Tuesday!
Interested in Open Knowledge? Want to meet others who are? …Look no further! OKFN and DevCSI are arranging the first Meet-up here in Edinburgh, with the Open Biblio project team taking the helm. OKFN Meet-ups are friendly and informal evenings for people to get together and talk about open data. London and Cambridge have had […]
Read moreOpen Knowledge Forum Austria (OKFO) – activities around openness in Austria
Austria is one of our incubating OKFN:LOCAL chapters in its last stage before full incorporation. Its core group of organisers in Vienna are planning an OGD BusinessDay2012 on March 22nd in Vienna and the OGD2012 Conference on June 26th in Linz, Austria. For updates and more information, go to http://gov.opendata.at/okfo/index.html. The OKFO – the Open […]
Read moreOpen Knowledge Foundation hits the Med – Greek group launched!
Greece is our first Open Knowledge Foundation Local group in the Mediterranean, and just had their first meetup in Thessaloniki with regular public meetups and events to follow, including a public meetup with staff from the OKFN, Wikimedia, Creative Commons and other organisations on April 5th at the Aristoteleian University of Thessaloniki. For updates and […]
Read moreDoes Switzerland have no need for Open Government Data?
Switzerland is one of our incubating OKFN:LOCAL chapters in its last stage before full incorporation. Its core group of organisers, a talented collaboration from Geneva and Zürich who also founded http://OpenData.CH, are planning an Open Data Conference in Zürich on June 28th. Here’s a hello from Hannes Gassert and Andreas Amsler regarding the state of […]
Read moreHow Spending Stories Fact Checks Big Brother, the Wiretappers’ Ball
This piece was co-written with Eric King of Privacy International and comes as Privacy International launches a huge new data release about companies selling surveillance technologies. It is cross-posted on the MediaShift PBS IDEA LAB and the OpenSpending blog. Today, the global surveillance industry is estimated at around $5 billion a year. But which companies […]
Read moreMeet-up this Monday in Cambridge UK
Join us in the Panton Arms in Cambridge for an evening of open data! The Open Knowledge Foundation’s #OpenDataCBG meet-up will take place this Monday 27th February in the Panton Arms. Sign-up on our meet-up page now, and tweet using the #OpenDataCBG hashtag! We will gather in the Panton Arms from 7pm, with lightning talks […]
Read moreEnergy and Climate Hackday, March 3rd
On Saturday 3rd March we’re getting together for the Energy and Climate Hackday to data-wrangle and build apps around energy and climate data. All skills and interest groups are welcome: developers, data journalists, economists, climate scientists, environmentalists and interested citizens. When? Saturday 3rd March, 11am GMT (12pm CET/6am EST) to ~7pm GMT (8pm CET/3pm EST) […]
Read moreAlfred P. Sloan Foundation Funds Open Economics Working Group at the Open Knowledge Foundation
We are delighted to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation in partnership with the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge has received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the development of an Open Economics Working Group. The aim of the working group is to encourage more […]
Read moreAnnouncing the ePSI Trailblazers 2012
In the run to the upcoming ePSI Conference 2012 on 16th March in Rotterdam, Netherlands, we are very excited to announce the ePSI Trailblazers 2012. What are the ePSI Trailblazers? What if, instead of handing out another award, we could offer you both recognition from your peers and help in improving your work? At the […]
Read moreAnnouncing the Open Data Handbook version 1.0
The Open Knowledge Foundation are proud to announce the launch of version 1.0 of the Open Data Handbook (formerly the Open Data Manual): Read the Open Data Handbook now! » The Handbook discusses the ‘why, what and how’ of open data – why to go open, what open is, how to make data open and […]
Read moreFinnish data journalism app contest
Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s leading national paper, is organizing an article app contest to find data visualizations. For many journalists today, it’s not a lack of open data that’s the problem, but a lack of the skills and off-the-shelf visualizations needed to make that open data useful to them. A year ago, the Finnish government decided […]
Read moreData Journalism Awards – Call for Entries!
Showcase your work and win a chance to €45,000 in prizes by applying for the first ever Data Journalism Awards In an age of overwhelming abundance of data, journalists and media organisations are learning to separate signal from noise in order to provide valuable insights to society. From the Guardian to the New York Times, […]
Read moreAnnouncing the Open Definition Licenses Service
We’re pleased to announce a simple new service from the Open Knowledge Foundation as part of the Open Definition Project: the (Open) Licenses Service. The service is ultra simple in purpose and function. It provides: Information on licenses for open data, open content, and open-source software in machine readable form (JSON) A simple web API […]
Read moreThe Year in (Public Domain) Review
Last month, the glorious Public Domain Review celebrated its first birthday. The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into the whopping plenitude that is the public domain, helping our readers to explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is […]
Read moreEffectopedia – An Open Data Project for Collaborative Scientific Research, with the aim of reducing Animal Testing
The following post is by Velichka Dimitrova, Coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group and Hristo Alajdov, Associate Professor at Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. One of the key problems in natural science research is the lack of effective collaboration. A lot of research is conducted by scientists from different disciplines, […]
Read morePanton Fellowships – Apply by 24th February!
The following post is by Laura Newman, a Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation and Coordinator of the Panton Fellowships. Funding for scientists who promote open data. £8,000 over one year, plus a small discretionary budget for travel and related expenses. How would you promote open data in science? See the Panton Principles’ website […]
Read moreOpen Biblio launches BibSoup in beta
BibSoup is here! And it’s going to revolutionise how you work with bibliographic metadata. The team has been coding and blogging and bugfixing for a while now on the BibServer software, and we’ve mentioned in passing that our own instance has been up and running under the name of BibSoup… Now we are officially launching […]
Read moreTranslators needed!
Do you speak another language apart from English? Have you got a little bit of spare time over the next week? CKAN 1.6 is set to release in one week’s time and all the new features need translating. Can you help us complete it in time? If you can spend 15 minutes filling in the […]
Read moreLet’s Make OpenPhilosophy.org!
The following post is by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Jonathan Gray and is cross-posted from his personal blog. A little while ago I posted some ideas for a project called OpenPhilosophy.org, which would enable users to transcribe, translate, annotate and create collections of philosophical texts which have entered the public domain. As was announced last […]
Read moreAnnouncing the School of Data
The following post is by Rufus Pollock, Director and Co-Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Philip Schmidt, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Peer 2 Peer University. Today, we’re announcing plans for a School of Data. The School will be a joint venture between the Open Knowledge Foundation and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). We […]
Read moreOGDCamp + OKCon = Open Knowledge Festival 2012 in Helsinki, Finland!
The following post is by Kat Braybrooke, London-based Community Coordinator of the Open Knowledge Foundation (Regional Chapters and Groups) and a core organiser of OKFest. On September 17-22 this year, global communities will be descending on the shores of Helsinki for a week-long celebration called the Open Knowledge Festival – and you’re the first to […]
Read moreThe Data Journalism Handbook: Final call for contributions
This post is by Liliana Bounegru, Project Coordinator at the European Journalism Centre, and Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is cross posted on DataDrivenJournalism.net Where can I find data and how can I request access to it? What tools are available to me? How can I find useful stories within […]
Read moreJoin us on Monday 27th February for #OpenDataCBG!
The following post is by Laura Newman, a Cambridge based Community Co-ordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Interested in Open Data? Live in the Cambridge area? Join us for #OpenDataCBG! On Monday 27th February, the open data community will be gathering in the Panton Arms in Cambridge for the second #OpenDataCBG meet-up. The evening is […]
Read moreJISC to fund development of TEXTUS project
The following post is by Sam Leon, Community Co-ordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re delighted to announce that JISC will be funding the initial development of the TEXTUS platform as part of its Digital Infrastructure Programme. TEXTUS will be a lightweight, easy-to-use platform that will enable users to read, share and collaborate around public […]
Read moreCOMMUNIA’s response to the proposed amendments to PSI Directive
The following guest post is by Timothy Vollmer, policy coordinator at Creative Commons. It has been adapted from his post on the same subject over on the COMMUNIA International Association blog. Creative Commons and the Open Knowledge Foundation are institutional members of COMMUNIA. The mission of COMMUNIA is to educate about, advocate for, offer expertise […]
Read moreDiving into Data: The School of Data Journalism at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia
This post is by Liliana Bounegru, Project Coordinator at the European Journalism Centre, and Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is cross posted on DataDrivenJournalism.net and journalismfestival.com. In the past investigative reporters would suffer from a scarcity of information relating to questions they were trying to answer. While this is still […]
Read moreAnnotators of the World Unite!
The following post is by Andrew Magliozzi founder of FinalsClub.org and one of the developers working on the Annotator javascript library and the AnnotateIt service. Scholars, bring us your ancient, worn, and insightful annotations. We have the tools to help you collect and connect your knowledge of Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Eliot and others. Together we can create […]
Read moreWikimedia and New Collaborations at Third #OpenDataLDN Meetup in London
The following post is by Kat Braybrooke, a London-based Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Most Londoners agree that Monday night is usually the worst time of the week to hold an event. The workday is long, people are tired and public transit seems to be especially unpleasant. This past week, however, we witnessed […]
Read moreOpen Economics Hackday
The following post is by Velichka Dimitrova coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group. It is great to see people coming together and doing something cool on a Saturday. The Open Economics Hackday gathered more than thirty people at the Barbican and online, crafting fancy visualisations, wrangling data and being creative together. The day was devoted […]
Read moreOpen Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN Software to Power new European Commission Data Portal
The European Commission is to make its data publicly and openly available through a new data portal, along the lines of those already used by national governments such as http://data.gov.uk/. Like http://data.gov.uk/ the new site will be based on the open-source CKAN Data Portal Software developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Foundation will also be […]
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