Group items tagged

"We need to organise Government data and software using an agreed set of standards that make our IT more open, cheaper and better connected. Following the outcome of a public consultation on Open Standards: Open Opportunities, we've set out in Open Standards Principles the rules that government bodies must follow when specifying their IT."

"From makerspaces to data wrangling schools to archives, the digital is being remixed by the open - and it is changing society as we know it. New concepts about public information, transparency and the Commons are combining in unprecedented ways, resulting in a breadth of transformative collaborations across the globe."

""Linked Open Data: The Essentials," a new quick-start guide for decision-makers who need to quickly get up to speed with the LOD concept, and who want to make their government or organization a part of the movement."

"Besides descriptive metadata which is already covered in other documents also non-sensitive data produced by libraries and related institutions is subject of the recommendations, e.g. statistical data or circulation data. Furthermore, the recommendations don't only cover open licensing but also open access, open standards and the documentation, sustainability as well as other apsects of open data."

"While the Open Data movement has yet to demonstrate its killer app, it shows much promise. It will take commitment from both innovators and the city governments to sustain the momentum over the year, but these early successes suggest that open API's and killer coders may be able to revolutionize the way cities operate and interact with their citizens."

"To help governments open and share their data, the W3C eGov Interest Group has developed the following guidelines. These straightforward steps emphasize standards and methodologies to encourage publication of government data, allowing the public to use this data in new and innovative ways."

Foursquare API

"In my humble opinion, there are two main reasons to be cautious: 1. Contests so far have generated relatively few ideas, most of which either relate to the realm of politics (e.g. how to map funding to politicians to what they do) or to relatively narrow areas, such as crime-related information. I have not yet seen anything extraordinary that would have a significant impact on service levels. 2. Contestants are necessarily either professional programmers, working for a vendor or self employed, or geeks. My contention is neither category is very likely to be hugely representative of the public at large."

"As I wrote in the past, wearing my typical analyst cynical hat, response to these contests has not been overwhelming. Sure we have seen a handful of original ideas, but often far from being ready for prime time, or difficult to sustain in the longer term."

"Today PSI reuse happens very, very, very seldom and this produces all kinds of paradoxes and waste: there are PAs that pay private companies for packaged versions of the data that they themselves produced and licensed very cheaply to those companies, citizens that cannot see or must pay to see data they paid for with their taxes, small businesses that sometimes can't even start because they'd need data that should be public and free but aren't."

the approach to open and linked data in the context of the UK Government, the emergence data.gov.uk as part of the previous administration's Making Public Data Public initiative; and the subtle change of emphasis accompanying the new administrations name change to the Transparency Programme.

"We have updated and expanded upon the Sebastopol list and identified ten principles that provide a lens to evaluate the extent to which government data is open and accessible to the public. The list is not exhaustive, and each principle exists along a continuum of openness. The principles are completeness, primacy, timeliness, ease of physical and electronic access, machine readability, non-discrimination, use of commonly owned standards, licensing, permanence and usage costs. "

"A utility built on top of Transparency Data, Poligraft takes in a block of text, parses it for entities like politicians and corporations, and returns a result set representing the political influence contained in that text."

"Poligraft takes in a block of text, parses it for entities like politicians and corporations, and returns a result set representing the political influence contained in that text."

"Clearly data release can reduce fraud and curb unnecessary spending. The MPs' expenses scandal has stimulated more interest in this area but there are already websites dedicated to examining how public money is spent. Releasing full financial breakdown of spend can save millions, as a recent case in Canada proved. A $3.2 billion tax evasion fraud was exposed when financial data was made publicly available."

The key issues according Peter Murray-rust: * What is data? * Why should data be open? (and when should it not be?) * Who owns data? * When should data be released? * How and where should data be exposed? * Datamining and textmining. * Reproducibility.

"This article reviews the need for Open Data, shows examples of why Open Data are valuable and summarizes some early initiatives in formalizing the right of access to and re-use of scientific data."