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"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."

"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."

"The business model we're imposing on top of this two-fold: * Some features of the system, such as personal dashboards, scheduled email reports and API access is only available to paying subscribers. * Access to premium data, such as market research, financial market data and analyst forecasts is sold for a fee. As the company name implies, this is a market for data, even though a lot of the "merchandise" is free of charge."

"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."

"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."

"More recently, I've used the same data to make my subjects more consistent and up to date. In this post, I'll describe why I need to do this, and why doing it isn't as hard as I feared that it might be."

"But the Library of Congress (LC) has recently made authoritative subject cataloging data freely available on a new website. There, you can query it through standard interfaces, or simply download it all for analysis. I recently downloaded their full data set (38 MB of zipped RDF), processed it, and used it to build new subject maps for The Online Books Page. The resulting maps are substantially richer than what I had before. My collection is fairly small by the standards of mass digitization- just shy of 40,000 items- but still, the new data, after processing, yielded over 20,000 new subject relationships, and over 600 new notes and explanations, for the subjects represented in the collection."

"we wanted to retrieve information from our bibliographica site to render in Wikipedia, and so as the pages are rendered with specific markup we can use the ISBN numbers present on the wikipedia articles to make consults to the bibliographica database"

"-- you can filter events then select "more" to see further details and a list of relevant publications based on the event speakers and the event theme; this can give a slightly better idea of what might be going on, as you can review the published work of those involved."