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Introducing the Sovereign Credit Risk Open Database

Angela Guess — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:55:44 +0000

Marc Joffe of the OKF reports, “Throughout the Eurozone, credit rating agencies have been under attack for their lack of transparency and for their pro-cyclical sovereign rating actions. In the humble belief that the crowd can outperform the credit rating oracles, we are introducing an open database of historical sovereign risk data. It is available at http://www.publicsectorcredit.org/sovdef/ where community members can both view and edit the data. Once the quality of this data is sufficient, the data set can be used to create unbiased, transparent models of sovereign credit risk. The database contains central government revenue, expenditure, public debt and interest costs from the 19th century through 2011 – along with crisis indicators taken from Reinhart and Rogoff’s public database.” continued…

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News from the First Open Economics International Workshop

Angela Guess — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:30:52 +0000

Velichka Dimitrova of OKF recently gave a recap of the organization’s first Open Economics International Workshop. Dimitrova writes, “The first Open Economics International Workshop gathered 40 academic economists, data publishers and funders of economics research, researchers and practitioners to a two-day event at Emmanuel College in Cambridge, UK. The aim of the workshop was to build an understanding around the value of open data and open tools for the Economics profession and the obstacles to opening up information, as well as the role of greater openness of the academy. This event was organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law and was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Audio and slides are available at the event’s webpage.” continued…

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Boundless Releasing Textbooks Under Creative Commons License

Angela Guess — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 18:00:57 +0000

Sam Leon of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Boundless, the open source digital textbook provider, is releasing all of its 18 open source textbooks under a Creative Commons Attribution and Share-Alike license. We covered the progress of this brilliant initiative mid-way through last year. Boundless leverages open content on the web, whether that’s information on Wikipedia or digital copies of public domain artworks, to produce textbooks that are free for everyone to access. Boundless provides an alternative to traditional textbooks that are out of reach to many given their often hefty price tags. We’re really excited to see that the company is now making all its content available under such a permissive license that will maximise re-use of this material but make sure that those who have spent time compiling and writing these resources are attributed.” continued…

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Moving Forward with Open Definition

Angela Guess — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 18:00:12 +0000

Mike Linksvayer of OpenDefinition.org recently wrote, “Open Definition (OD) is one of the first projects that the Open Knowledge Foundation created. Its purpose has been to provide, promote — and protect — a meaningful Open in Open Data and Open Content. It does this primarily through curating the Open Knowledge Definition (OKD), working with license stewards to ensure new licenses intending to be open are clearly so, and keeping lists of licenses that conform to the OKD, and those that do not — providing any entity intending to create an open project, or mandate ‘open’ in policy, with a clear reference as to which licenses will achieve their aims. continued…

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PrescribingAnalytics.com: How the NHS Could Save Millions of Dollars

Angela Guess — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:00:47 +0000

Carl Reynolds of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Last week saw the launch of prescribinganalytics.com (covered in the Economist and elsewhere). At present it’s ‘just’ a nice data visualisation of some interesting open data that show the NHS could potentially save millions from its drug budget. I say ‘just’ because we’re in discussions with several NHS organizations about providing a richer, tailored, prescribing analytics service to support the best use of NHS drug budgets. Working on the project was a lot of fun, and to my mind the work nicely shows the spectacular value of open data when combined with people and internet.” continued…

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Why Governments Should Go Open

Angela Guess — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 13:00:46 +0000

Guillermo Moncecchi of the Open Knowledge Foundation recently shared his argument as to why governments have a responsibility to go open. He writes, “The most common argument in favor of open data is that it enhances transparency, and while the link may not always be causal, it is certainly true that both tend to go hand-in-hand. But there is another, more expansive perspective on open government data: that it is part of an effort to build public infrastructure.” continued…

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Open Data Bootcamp Heads to Tanzania

Angela Guess — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 18:00:17 +0000

Michael Bauer of the Open Knowledge Foundation recently wrote, “I am on the Road in Tanzania and Ghana to spread the data love. Last week Tanzania’s first data journalism event happened. The Data Bootcamp, organized by the World Bank Institute and the African Media Initiative, brought together international experts, journalists, civil society organizations and technologists to work on data related projects. In 2010 Tanzania committed to release open government data as part of the open government partnership. Nevertheless, the Tanzanian government has only released two datasets so far. One goal of the data bootcamp was to spur demand by implementing small data projects.”

He goes on, “The format was tested before in South Africa, Kenya and Moldovia and helped to raise awareness of Open Data. In preparation and during the workshop four more datasets were scraped and liberated. Further data was collected by the participants to work on their specific projects. Of the 40 participants only 7 were able to code – the majority were journalists and activists who never handled data before. Through the three days they received an intensive training in how to use spreadsheets and tools like Google Refine or Fusion Tables to tell stories with data. The data bootcamps not only consist of intense hands-on learning experience, they also are a small competition, where $2000 are awarded to the winner.”

Martin Weller on the Open Access Swindle

Angela Guess — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 15:30:14 +0000

Martin Weller of the Open Knowledge Foundation recently discussed what he refers to as the “great open access swindle.” He writes, “Just to be clear from the outset, I am an advocate for open access, and long ago took a stance to only publish OA and to only review for OA. I’m not suggesting here that open access is itself a swindle, but rather that the current implementation, in particular commercial publishers adopting Gold OA, is problematic. In my digital scholarship book, I made two pleas, the first was for open access publishing, and the second was for scholars to own the process of change. On this second point, the book ends thus:” continued…

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Success for Open Data at OKFest

Angela Guess — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 18:00:15 +0000

Mark Wainwright of OKF writes, “Last week’s OKFest is finally over, after a hectic week of talks, workshops, films, hackathons, and more. You can read about highlights such as Hans Rosling’s brilliant talk over on the OKFN blog. The biggest challenge for me was being in two places at once on Wednesday afternoon, with both the CKAN workshop and a panel discussion, including me, in the Open Science stream on ‘Immediate access to raw data from experiments’, where I was on the panel, running in nearby buildings at overlapping times. (Happily I more or less pulled it off.)” continued…

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Europeana Opens Up Data on 20M Items

Angela Guess — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 11:00:08 +0000

Jonathan Gray of OKF reports, “Today Europeana is opening up data about all 20 million of the items it holds under the CC0 rights waiver. This means that anyone can reuse the data for any purpose – whether using it to build applications to bring cultural content to new audiences in new ways, or analysing it to improve our understanding of Europe’s cultural and intellectual history. This is a coup d’etat for advocates of open cultural data. The data is being released after a grueling and unenviable internal negotiation process that has lasted over a year – involving countless meetings, workshops, and white papers presenting arguments and evidence for the benefits of openness.”

He goes on, “Why does this matter? For one thing it will open the door for better discovery mechanisms for cultural content. continued…

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Linked Open Government Data: Dispatch from the Second International Open Government Data Conference

Kristen Milhollin — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 17:55:40 +0000

“What we have found with this project is… the capacity to take value out of open data is very limited.”

With the abatement of the media buzz surrounding open data since the first International Open Government Data Conference (IOGDC) was held in November 2011, it would be easy to believe that the task of opening up government data for public consumption is a fait accompli. Most of the discussion at this year’s IOGDC conference, held July 10-12, centered on the advantages and roadblocks to creating an open data ecosystem within government, and the need to establish the right mix of policies to promote a culture of openness and sharing both within and between government agencies and externally with journalists, civil society, and the public at large. According to these metrics the open government data movement has much to celebrate: 1,022,787 datasets from 192 catalogs in 24 languages representing 43 countries and international organizations.

The looming questions about the utility of open government data make it clear, however, that the movement is still in its early stages. Much remains to be done to to provide usable, reliable, machine-readable and valuable government data to the public.

continued…

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Linked Open Vocabularies Now an Official OKF Project

Angela Guess — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:00:52 +0000

Pierre-Yves Vandenbussche recently wrote, “We are delighted to announce that Linked Open Vocabularies is now being hosted on Open Knowledge Foundation servers and is now officially an Open Knowledge Foundation project… The LOV project was born in the framework of the Datalift project which aims at providing a platform to lift data from semi-structured formats (csv, xls, etc.) to linked data. Part of this project under Mondeca‘s company responsibility was focused on vocabulary selection and re-use. The LOV project purpose goes now far beyond this original catalogue. The LOV dataset is maintained by Bernard Vatant and Pierre-Yves Vandenbussche.” continued…

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Getting Involved with the School of Data

Angela Guess — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 18:00:58 +0000

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s new School of Data has announced several ways that Semantic Web professionals can get involved. According to the site, “The School of Data is a friendly and inclusive community of people who are enthusiastic about working with data. Whether you are an experienced data wrangler, a beginner keen to gain skills and help others, or an organisation looking to join the School of Data partnership, there are many ways you can get involved with the School of Data.” continued…

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New Draft Specification: Data Catalog Schema & Protocol

Angela Guess — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 14:30:36 +0000

Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation recently commented on a new data catalog schema and protocol draft specification. He writes, “Open Data is an idea that continues to gain momentum, and one of the signs of this is that the world has more and more data catalogs. This is great for many reasons but it also brings its own problem especially around interoperability and standardization — the lack of standard schema and interfaces is something we’ve experienced in our work on projects like http://publicdata.eu/ which pulls together dataset information from many different data catalogs around Europe.” continued…

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OKF Launches School of Data

Angela Guess — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:30:11 +0000

Laura Newman of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Earlier this year, we announced plans to launch the School of Data. Thanks to the generous support of Open Society Foundations and the Shuttleworth Foundation, we’re now ready to go! We’re holding a kick-off sprint next week, and we invite you to get involved. The School of Data is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). The School will provide online training for data ‘wrangling’ skills – the ability to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different types of data.” continued…

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