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Constructing the Open Data Landscape Posted on September 7, 2011 by Nicola Hughes In an article in today’s Telegraph regarding Francis Maude’s Public Data Corporation, Michael Cross asks: “What makes the state think it can be at the cutting edge of the knowledge economy“. He writes in terms of market and business share, giving the example of the satnav market worth over $100bn a year yet it’s based on free data from the US Government’s GPS system. He credits the internet revolution for transforming public sector data into ‘cashable proposition’. We, along with many other start-ups, foundations and civic coding groups, are part of this ‘geeky world’ of Open Data. So we’d like to add our piece concerning the Open Data movement. Michael has the right to ask this question because there is this constant custodial battle being fought every day, every scrape and every script on the web for the rights to data. So let me tell you about the geeks’ take on Open Data.

Public sector needs to improve quality of information, warns Eurim Parliamentary group gives cautious welcome to the EU's plans to open up more public sector data reddit this omnitracker.omniTrackEVarEvent( 12, 16, 'Guardian Government Computing: Reddit', 'click', '.reddit a' ); Comments (0) Sade Laja Guardian Professional, Monday 19 December 2011 07.08 EST Article history Sharing data on public services could have serious consequences unless the material has been valued, maintained and protected and the original reasons for its collection have been taken into account, the Information Society Alliance (Eurim), has warned. In a report on the quality of public sector information, the group says that the drive to put central and local government data online, open to public scrutiny, has revealed the long standing problems with quality that lie behind the reluctance of some departments and agencies to trust one another's data. It adds that it is important that decisions on spending cuts are based on good quality information.

International Dataset Search View View Source Description:  The TWC International Open Government Dataset Catalog (IOGDC) is a linked data application based on metadata scraped from an increasing number of international dataset catalog websites publishing a rich variety of government data. Metadata extracted from these catalog websites is automatically converted to RDF linked data and re-published via the TWC LOGD SPAQRL endpoint and made available for download. The TWC IOGDC demo site features an efficient, reconfigurable faceted browser with search capabilities offering a compelling demonstration of the value of a common metadata model for open government dataset catalogs. We believe that the vocabulary choices demonstrated by IOGDC highlights the potential for useful linked data applications to be created from open government catalogs and will encourage the adoption of such a standard worldwide. Warning: This demo will crash IE7 and IE8. Contributor: Eric Rozell Contributor: Jinguang Zheng Contributor: Yongmei Shi Live Demo:  http://logd.tw.rpi.edu/demo/international_dataset_catalog_search Notes: This is an experimental demo and some queries may take longer time to response (30 ~60 seconds). Please referesh this page if the demo is not loaded. Our metadata model can be accessed here . Procedure to getting and publishing metadata is described here . The RDF dump of the datasets can be downloaded here. Welcome to S2S! International OGD Catalog Search (searching 736,578 datasets)

Data-Driven Journalism Workshop on EU Spending: Tools & Techniques. Utrecht, 8th-9th September. Posted on August 9, 2011 by Lucy Chambers The following post is by Liliana Bonegru, Project Coordinator at the European Journalism Centre (EJC), and Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The post announces a joint workshop between the EJC and OKF, focusing on how to get started with data-driven reporting on spending data. This workshop will focus particularly on EU spending data. Interested in data-driven journalism and EU spending? The European Journalism Centre together with the Open Knowledge Foundation is hosting a one and a half day data-driven journalism workshop on EU spending in Utrecht, the Netherlands on 8th-9th September.

Europeana Linked Open Data The data.europeana.eu pilot is part of Europeana's ongoing effort of making its metadata available as Linked Open Data on the Web. It allows others to access metadata collected from Europeana providers, via standard Web technologies, enrich this metadata and give this enriched metadata back to the providers. Links between Europeana resources and other resources in the Linked Data Web will enable discovery of semantically related resources, as, say, when two artworks are created by artists who are related to each other. The data is represented in the Europeana Data Model (EDM) and the described resources are addressable and dereferencable by their URIs - for instance, http://data.europeana.eu/item/09404/C3C50BD0958EE18ECE1B8F93780DC84D8273664F leads either to an HTML page on the Europeana portal for the object it identifies or to raw, machine-processable data on this object. Disclaimer: data.europeana.eu is currently in pilot stage, and can thus be changed at any moment! Your feedback is more than welcome, and may lead to updates in the prototype service. What's in here for you? data.europeana.eu currently contains metadata on 3.5 million texts, images, videos and sounds gathered by Europeana. These objects come from content providers who have reacted early and positively to Europeana's initiative of promoting more open data and new data exchange agreements. These collections come from 10 direct Europeana providers encompassing around 300 cultural institutions from 17 countries. They cover a great variety of heritage objects, such as this 18th-century view of a German landscape from the Polish National Museum in Warsaw, or Neil Robson's memories of the herring business from the Tyne and Wear Archives & Museums. For more information, see our datasets page.

The challenge As noted in Open Data Stories’ first story, there are calls from various quarters for more data on the utility of governments releasing data and other material for re-use. The challenge would seem to be this: if people and organisations want governments to continue to invest in open data initiatives, they should jump into the feedback loop and tell governments, and the world, when they are putting open government data to good use. The scale or nature of beneficial use shouldn’t matter. It might be economic, creative, cultural or environmental. Or it could be something else. But tell us your story. Equally, interested stakeholders such as Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation can tell us their stories too, even if that is only drawing us to relevant (and openly licensed ) articles that we can repost on Open Data Stories. And, of course, agencies who see the data they steward being put to good use should tell us too. Whatever the case, share your stories with others. The more you do, the richer the feedback loop and that, in turn, is likely to enable open data policies to be better developed and refined and, ultimately, to be sustainable.

Part 2 of the Open Data, Open Society report is now available online Posted on September 1, 2011 by marco Open Data, Open Society is a research project about openness of public data in EU local administrations by for the Laboratory of Economics and Management of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa. The first report of the project, released in October 2010 under a Creative Commons cc-by license, can be downloaded from the website of the DIME project (PDF) or read online as one HTML file on the Sant’Anna School website (*). The conclusions of the project, a shorter report titled “Open Data: Emerging trends, issues and best practices” and finished in June 2011, are now available online under the same license at the following locations: single HTML file PDF format, Sant’Anna school PDF format, DIME website Another part of the project, the Open Data, Open Society survey has been extended until the end of 2011. Thank you in advance for announcing the survey to all the city and regional administrations of EU-15 and, if you want, to add further translations of its introduction!

Capturing human rights data in Analyzer Human rights groups collect data containing details of human right abuses from various sources, including medical records, newspaper articles, witness testimonies, letters, interviews, and official reports and documents. Analyzer can be used to capture this data for analysis. Data is coded according to the "Who did what to whom" model and entered into the capture set of Analyzer. Data about the source of the information is entered in the source tab, shown in Figure 1. (Note: the data in the figures shown here, unless otherwise indicated, are from a sample, not an actual, dataset.)

Make it easy for your organization to publish and manage public data You can achieve your organization’s transparency goals, cost-effectively, by streamlining the data publishing process and automating maintenance and updates. Internal stakeholders, in any department or agency, with little or no technical assistance, become first-class data publishers. While administrators manage the organization’s data in one central location, offer constituents a consistent and privately-branded online experience and get real-time data consumption and citizen engagement metrics.

Data Without Borders seeks to match non-profits in need of data analysis with freelance and pro bono data scientists who can work to help them with data collection, analysis, visualization, or decision support.

AfDB Launches the Open Data for Africa PlatformThe African Development Bank Group (AfDB), in partnership with Knoema, has launched an Open Data for Africa platform aimed at significantly increasing access to quality data necessary for managing and monitoring development results in African countries, including the MDGs. The platform will also serve as a knowledge center for collecting, accessing…View all Introduction

My blog All of Tumblr What is BuzzData? Data should be free-flowing, well-organized and easy to share. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place where you could store, share and show off your data with just a couple of mouse clicks? BuzzData lets you publish your data in a smarter, easier way. Instead of juggling versions and overwriting files, use BuzzData and enjoy a social network designed for data.

The Top 38 Excuses Government Agencies Give for Not Being Able to Fulfill Your Data Request

A free search engine for data sets published by governments, private companies and other organizations. It now indexes 255180 datasets from many sources.