Prachi Patel of IEEE Spectrum reports, “Farmers today produce three times as much food as they did 50 years ago using just 12 percent more land, thanks to new technologies and better farming practices. But the global playing field isn’t level. In Africa, farmers produce a fraction of what they could, according to the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, and most barely get by, struggling against infertile soil, drought, and diseases. Helping farmers—in Africa and elsewhere—produce more will be key to lifting millions out of poverty and sustainably feeding a world population of 9 billion in 2050. Food-policy experts believe that a crucial step toward that goal is to give farmers, scientists, and entrepreneurs unhindered access to agricultural data which is generated at research centers worldwide.” continued…

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Danny Palmer of Computing.co.uk reports, “US President Barack Obama has signed an executive order that requires government agencies to make publicly accessible data open and machine readable. ‘Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable,’ reads the Open Data Policy order. In 2009, Obama pledged to make his administration the most open in the history of US government. The administration hopes that innovators, including researchers and entrepreneurs, will be able to examine and use the data to benefit the country.” continued…

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BOSTON, May 8, 2013 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — karmadata officially introduced its freemium website (www.karmadata.com) and API (www.karmadata.com/API) to the global data community at the Data 2.0 Summit held April 30th in San Francisco.  karmadata’s website enables users to find, visualize, and share data of interest to them and their social networks.  The karmadata API provides standardized linked data from the world’s data sources, allowing developers to design and build their own applications. continued…

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Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar reports, “After years of steady growth, open data is now entering into public discourse, particularly in the public sector. If President Barack Obama decides to put the White House’s long-awaited new open data mandate before the nation this spring, it will finally enter the mainstream. As more governments, businesses, media organizations and institutions adopt open data initiatives, interest in the evidence behind  release and the outcomes from it is similarly increasing. High hopes abound in many sectors, from development to energy to health to safety to transportation. ‘Today, the digital revolution fueled by open data is starting to do for the modern world of agriculture what the industrial revolution did for agricultural productivity over the past century,’ said Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, speaking at the G-8 Open Data for Agriculture Conference.” continued…

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Jean-Claude Bradley of Chemistry World recently wrote, “Almost a decade ago, the term ‘podcasting’ grabbed society’s imagination. Although sharing audio and video files over the internet had been possible for some time, the technology for creating, disseminating and following media reached a critical mass for the average internet user. Predictably, this situation represented different opportunities for different factions of the ideological spectrum. At one end, some saw new means to monetise their skill sets and products. At the other end, another group recognised a means for the radical sharing of knowledge. For the majority, the opportunities lay somewhere in the middle – for example, freely sharing some content with the hope of selling another portion, or freely sharing content but with restrictions on its use.” continued…

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Jonathan Gray of the OKF reports, “On Tuesday President Obama unveiled a new $100 million research initiative to map the human brain. The BRAIN (Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative will ‘accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought.’ As well as trying to vastly improve scientific understanding of ‘the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears’, it is hoped that this research will enable new forms of prevention and treatment for conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism and epilepsy.” continued…

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Funded by The Australian Commonwealth Government through the Australian National Data Service, the European Commission through the iCordi project under the 7th Framework Program, and the U.S. through the RDA/US activity supported by the National Science Foundation, it began its work last August when it established an international steering group with these funds. In March, it held its first plenary meeting and had its official launch.

Dr. Francine Berman, Professor of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is Chair of the Research Data Alliance/U.S. The Semantic Web Blog recently conducted a  Q&A with her to learn more about RDA plans:

continued…

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John Kennedy of Silicon Republic reports, “Ireland’s State broadcaster RTÉ, as part of its strategy to preserve the memories of a nation in digital form, is to collaborate with SFI’s recently announced mega CSET the Insight Centre to employ big data and the semantic web to make hundreds of thousands of hours of audio and video content available at the touch of a button. In a collaboration announced at the European Data Forum in Dublin this morning, RTÉ will work with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Galway and the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) to make sure that content going back over 60 years can be accessed digitally.” continued…

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Derrick Harris of GigaOM recently expressed the need for a data democracy, not a data dictatorship. He writes, “The democratization of data is a real phenomenon, but building a sustainable data democracy means truly giving power to the people. The alternative is just a shift of power from traditional data analysts within IT departments to a new generation of data scientists and app developers. And this seems a lot more like a dictatorship than a democracy — a benevolent dictatorship, but a dictatorship nonetheless. These individuals and companies aren’t entirely bad, of course, and they’re actually necessary. Apps that help predict what we want to read, where we’ll want to go next or what songs we’ll like are certainly cool and even beneficial in their ability to automate and optimize certain aspects of our lives and jobs.” continued…

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Tom Slee of The Guardian recently raised some of his concerns regarding who profits most from open data. He states, “In the technology world, ‘openness!’ has long been a battle cry of the underprivileged. It’s the language of bottom up freedom against top-downcontrol; of Linux against Microsoft and Wikipedia against Britannica. And now, open government data is the demand of those who would drag government data out from behind locked doors. But the world has changed since Linus Torvalds started his hobby operating system, and now openness is heard from the top as much as the bottom.” continued…

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Joshua Sabatini of The San Francisco Examiner reports, “San Francisco has fallen behind in the open-data movement, but city officials say a new proposal will once again put it on the forefront. Three years ago, The City adopted its first open-data ordinance to encourage departments to release their data sets — i.e., restaurant health scores or details on special events in The City. But the effort appears to have wilted, and cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Chicago have since created more aggressive initiatives than San Francisco. ‘Unfortunately we have fallen a little bit behind,’ said Board of Supervisors President David Chiu. ‘We have about 500 city-maintained data sets. But there are literally thousands of data sets that we could put out to the public’.” continued…

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Craig Hammer of the Harvard Business Review recently opined that open data has little value if no one is able to use it. He writes, “Open data could be the gamechanger when it comes to eradicating global poverty. In the last two years, central and local governments and multilateral organizations around the world have opened a range of data — information on budgets, infrastructure, health, sanitation, education, and more — online, for free. The data are not perfect, but then perfection is not the goal. Rather, the goal is for this data to become actionable intelligence: a launchpad for investigation, analysis, triangulation, and improved decision making at all levels. While the ‘opening’ has generated excitement from development experts, donors, several government champions, and the increasingly mighty geek community, the hard reality is that much of the public has been left behind, or tacked on as an afterthought.” continued…

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John Wilbanks of Nature.com recently opined, “An article that is free to read is not necessarily open for all uses — often, it cannot be reused for text mining or in derivative works, for example. The permitted uses depend on the copyright license used by the author. In my view, for an article to be considered truly open access, it has to meet the widely accepted definition in the Budapest Open Access Initiative — a set of recommendations laid out by leaders of the open-access movement in 2001. That is, users must be able to ‘read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited’.” continued…

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Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar reports, “GitHub has been gaining new prominence as the use of open source software in government grows. Earlier this month, I included a few thoughts from Chicago’s chief information officer, Brett Goldstein, about the city’s use of GitHub, in a piece exploring GitHub’s role in government. While Goldstein says that Chicago’s open data portal will remain the primary means through which Chicago releases public sector data, publishing open data on GitHub is an experiment that will be interesting to watch, in terms of whether it affects reuse or collaboration around it. In a followup email, Goldstein, who also serves as Chicago’s chief data officer, shared more about why the city is on GitHub and what they’re learning. Our discussion follows.” continued…

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That company is the creation of four Italian entrepreneurs – CEO Michele Barbera, president Gabriele Antonelli, partnerships director Andrea Di Benedetto, and Luca Pieraccini – who lived first-hand the frustrating experience of trying to find and leverage useful data for the custom web and mobile apps they were developing while running and working in small IT consulting companies. In an attempt to reverse the ratio of finding and cleaning data to actually building apps, says Barbera, the founders began participating in several EU-funded research projects and in the Open Data movement in Europe and Italy, including founding the non-profit Linked Open Data Italy. They also started experimenting with Semantic Web technologies.

“Open Data helps us to find valuable data and to build value-added web and mobile apps,” says Barbera. “So, let’s say that we solved partly the first problem of finding data, but not the second one, normalizing and cleaning data, since it is still very difficult to merge different data sources to put data in context.” continued…

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