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At a session discussing open data on the web at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference last week, W3C eGov consultant Phil Archer had this to say: That in his mind and the minds of the semantic web technology business people gathered at the event, “Open data is strongly associated with Linked Data, but the world doesn’t necessarily agree with us.” What they are thinking about: “JSON and CSVs are the kings,” he said. “If you look at open data portals, CSVs [which get converted to JSON files] outweigh Linked Data by a mile,” he noted. And, he said, religious wars between those who see the world as triples vs. CSVs won’t be good for anyone. “If we keep telling the public sector to aim for 5-star data, vs. CSV 3-star data, we are in danger of the whole open data movement collapsing.”
"I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve joined Mozilla to build and direct their new open science initiative – the Mozilla Science Lab. The project is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. I’m excited to be returning to my open roots, as well as continuing to push the boundaries of what “digital research” can and should look like, and further explore how we can make the web work for science".
When last July Research Councils UK (RCUK) announced its new Open Access (OA) policy it sparked considerable controversy, not least because the policy required researchers to “prefer” Gold OA (OA publishing) over Green OA (self-archiving). The controversy was such that earlier this year the House of Lords Science & Technology Committee launched an inquiry into the implementation of the policy and the subsequent report was highly critical of RCUK.
ICFJ Anywhere is your online source for high-quality journalism online courses, offered by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). ICFJ is supporting journalists all over the world with free online courses on a range of topics, including digital journalism, investigative reporting, covering labor issues, International coverage of religion, business and economics and much more. Whether it is instructor-led or self-taught, ICFJ's Online Courses offers practical training, aimed to help novice and more experienced journalists worldwide. Courses are also offered in a variety of languages including English, Arabic, Persian, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish and French.
Datawrapper was created to make usage of modern visualization libraries simpler and faster. This tool takes the coding out of the publishing process, making it faster and easier to use. Datawrapper is aimed to be a tool for data-driven journalism and as an enabler to use open data in the public interest. Furthermore, the tool is open source, to ensure that newsrooms are less dependent on external platforms, gain control over appearance and the data they collect over time in the public interest. Going forward we hope that the tool is used to start data desks around the world. Using Datawrapper and other tools for mapping, network visualizations and other forms of visualization is a way to the future, using data to build in-depth, trustable reporting and to provide better context about what is going on.
Open data and transparency will be one of the three main topics at the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland next week. Today transparency campaigners released preview results from the global Open Data Census showing that G8 countries still have a long way to go in releasing essential information as open data.
The Open Data Census is run by the Open Knowledge Foundation, with the help of a network of local data experts around the globe. It measures the openness of data in ten key areas including those essential for transparency and accountability (such as election results and government spending data), and those vital for providing critical services to citizens (such as maps and transport timetables). Full results for the 2013 Open Data Census will be released later this year.
The department Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) at the Institute for Applied Computer Science at University of Bonn and Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) is currently being established. The department is led by Sören Auer. The primary objective of the research group is to advance research and technology in the field of enterprise information systems & semantic technologies and to widely apply this research in large-scale use cases. A particular focus of research and technology is information, data and knowledge integration employing Linked Data strategies. The department is committed to the open source, open access and open knowledge movements.
Maphub in an online application for exploring and annotating digitized, high-resolution historic maps. All user-contributed annotations are shared via the Maphub Open Annotation API. The first demo has been bootstrapped with approximately 6000 public domain maps taken from the Library of Congress Historic Map division.
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One could easily make the case that all is rosy in the Open Data world. The number of open data initiatives has grown from two to over 300 in just four years, whilst the most notable initiative to open up governments worldwide, the Open Government Partnership (OGP), has seen membership rocket from eight to 59 countries in under two years. Over a million datasets have now been released by governments around the world, spawning new businesses and fascinating social projects such as Openspending.org. In recent months, we have seen the Open Data movement being linked to the Big Data one withcorporations being asked to open their datasets for social good. This is impressive progress by anyone’s standards – particularly for a subject that was the preserve of just a few geeks as recently as 2009.
The Global Open Data Initiative (GODI) is a new initiative led by Fundar, Sunlight Foundation, World Wide Web Foundation, The Open Institute and Open Knowledge Foundation to share principles and resources for governments and societies on how to best harness the opportunities created by opening government data. The initiative is intended to provide a roadmap of policies and institutions that countries can use to build meaningful new open data reforms and initiatives, informed by the successes of others. Through GODI and associated work, we intend to expand awareness of open data and related issues, stimulate the development of the global open data community, provide a leading vision for how governments approach open data – as well as gather, expand, and amplify the evidence base for open data in general.
LODLAM is Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums. LODLAM.net is an informal, borderless network of enthusiasts, technicians, professionals and any number of other people who are interested in or working with Linked Open Data pertaining to galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Linked refers to Linked Data, or the concept of connecting data using W3C standards. Open refers to the use of open licenses, such as the Public Domain Mark, Creative Commons 0, Creative Commons Attribution, and Creative Commons Attribution-Alike. Data can be raw data, metadata, descriptive data, bibliographic data, etc.
This site is the UK Department for Communities and Local Government's official Linked Open Data site. It provides a selection of statistics on a variety of themes including Local Government finance, housing and homelessness, wellbeing, deprivation, and the department's business plan as well as supporting geographical data. All of the data is available as fully browsable and queryable Linked Data, and the majority is free to re-use under the Open Government Licence.
The Open Data User Group will gather views of open data users/re-users to influence data releases for free through government’s Data Strategy Board (DSB).
Role of the group The aim of the group is to: conduct consultation to identify and prioritise public sector informationprovide advice to the DSB on subsequent spending review period bids for additional funding for open data which would benefit the UK economyundertake appropriate research and evidence gathering to inform the business case to release open datadraw on expertise and experience of the user community to build the business case to the DSB on how additional funding for data free at the point of use and re-use should be prioritised
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The UK Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) has announced plans to open up more government datasets, providing the raw material for technology companies and developers to create apps and data-led businesses. The government first unveiled its open data initiative in November 2011, claiming that the move would aid economic growth, transport and healthcare. Today's news was announced at the G8 Innovation Conference in London as part of the government's wider Information Economy Strategy, which aims to generate fresh growth opportunities for some of the UK’s most innovative technology businesses.
Large volumes of valuable cassava data have been made openly available through a joint initiative between CGIAR Consortium member the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA-Nigeria), Cornell University and other partners. The move highlights a concrete example of CGIAR’s commitment to mainstream Open Access – with members of the CGIAR Consortium making their agricultural research data, information and knowledge widely accessible. The cassava database, called Cassavabase, was developed as part of the NEXTGEN Cassava project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK Department for International Development.
In this post, we’ll look at a simple PDF document to get a feel for what’s involved with scraping a well-behaved table from it. Whilst this won’t turn you into a virtuoso scraper of PDFs, it should give you a few hints about how to get started. If you don’t count yourself as a programmer, it may be worth reading through this tutorial anyway! If nothing else, it may give a feel for the sorts of the thing that are possible when it comes to extracting data from a PDF document.
The shooting of Mark Duggan on 4 August sparked a series of riots, first in Tottenham then across England. Follow their spread on our interactive timeline
An independent, open source platform aimed at making it easier for governments and businesses to publish open data has released a new version of their API. The CKAN API allows access to catalog listings of open datasets, full-text searches, and sharing of statistics on open data usage. While several governments are releasing their data via APIs, the global not-for-profit agency Open Knowledge Foundation is encouraging data publishers to consider using the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) platform. CKAN provides a sleek design interface that can be branded with any business or government’s livery to create an easy-to-use access point into a company, city, state, or nation’s open data catalog. Most recently, the US Government has upgraded its data catalog at data.gov to make use of the new CKAN 2.0 platform.
The Panton Fellowships have been created in order to support scientists – particularly graduate students and early-stage career scientists – to explore this idea, and to tackle those barriers which currently prevent science data from being made open.
The mission of Science Hack Day is to get excited and make things with science! A Hack Day is an event that brings together designers, developers, scientists, citizen scientists, web geeks, young people, the public, basically anyone with good ideas in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building ‘cool stuff’. Hack Days were originally created by Yahoo! in 2005 and soon after became a worldwide trend. By collaborating on focused tasks during this short period, small groups of hackers are capable of producing remarkable results. Some Hack Days have a specific focus. There have already been very successful Music Hack Days and Government Hack Days. It’s time for a Hack Day focused on science!
The Open Data on the Web workshop attracted substantial interest leading to two very intensive days of input and discussion. The initial motivation for the event was a desire to engage more fully with wider open data community, in particular the section of the community that is focused on CSVs and JSON rather than linked data. To achieve this the events was organized by W3C in collaboration with two other open organizations.
ПрезидентВладимир Путинподписал федеральный закон «О внесении изменений в федеральный закон «Об информации, информационных технологиях и о защите информации» и федеральный закон «Об обеспечении доступа к информации о деятельности государственных органов и органов местного самоуправления». Закон был принят Госдумой 24 мая 2013 г. и одобрен Советом Федерации 29 мая 2013 г. Федеральный закон направлен на дальнейшую реализацию политики по обеспечению открытости информации о деятельности государственных органов и органов местного самоуправления, говорится в пояснительной записке на сайте Кремля.
The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. OAI has its roots in the open access and institutional repository movements. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program. Over time, however, the work of OAI has expanded to promote broad access to digital resources for eScholarship, eLearning, and eScience.
ARCOMEM is a EU-funded research project. It is about memory institutions like archives, museums, and libraries in the age of the Social Web. Memory institutions are more important now than ever: as we face greater economic and environmental challenges we need our understanding of the past to help us navigate to a sustainable future. This is a core function of democracies, but this function faces stiff new challenges in face of the Social Web, and of the radical changes in information creation, communication and citizen involvement that currently characterise our information society (e.g., there are now more social network hits than Google searches). Social media are becoming more and more pervasive in all areas of life.
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