The Guardian, Google, and the Open Knowledge Foundation have launched a new competition to find the best open government data visualization. The announcement states: “Governments around the world are releasing a tidal wave of open data – on everything from spending through to crime and health. Now you can compare national, regional and city-wide data from hundreds of locations around the world. But how good is this data? We want to see what you can do with it. What apps and visualisations can you make with this data? We want to see how the data changes the way you see the world. In conjunction with Google and the Open Knowledge Foundation (who will be helping us judge the results), see if you can win the $2,000 prize.” Read more

The Open Knowledge Foundation is looking for a Python Developer in London, England. According to the post, “The OKFN is recruiting junior and senior Python web developers, primarily to work on CKAN, our open source, open data catalogue. There will also be further responsibilities to develop data visualisation and other data-driven services. CKAN is an open source web-based product written in Python. It allows users to submit, search for and find open data. As well as powering thedatahub.org, CKAN is the catalogue behind the UK government’s data.gov.uk website. It also powers over 30 other catalogues around the world. If you are an outstanding Python web developer, with a keen interest in open data and enjoy working on open-source products, we’d love to hear from you.” Read more

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.)” Read more

The Open Knowledge Foundation is hosting a Development Data Challenge this weekend in London. According to the organization, “This weekend in London, coders, designers, development experts, data wranglers and interested citizens and invited for the Development Data Challenge in London. Join us at the Guardian for a weekend of data wrangling, visualising and challenging questions. Bringing together hacks and hackers, developers and development experts, we want to answer interesting and difficult questions about international development – and in the process, demonstrate the value of the amazing amount of new data that is now available.” Read more

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.” Read more

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.” Read more

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.” Read more

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.” Read more

Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Last Friday (May 4), the Ministry of Planning in Brazil launched the final version of the Brazilian Open Data Portal. In line with the federal government policy to promote the use of free software in public administration, the portal was made using only free and open source tools. Among them is the Open Knowledge Foundation’s open-source data portal software CKAN. Moreover, the whole process of development of the portal was conducted with the participation of concerned citizens in an open way to promote open data.” Read more

The Open Knowledge Foundation is using open data to try to prevent violent conflict around the world. The foundation states, “We’re in the planning stages of a conflict prevention project called PAX and open data perspectives have fed into our thinking in its processes and structures. PAX aims to provide early warnings of emerging violent conflict, through an online collaborative system of data sharing and analysis. We’re still in the early stages of exploration and experiment, but the principle is that open data could help provide warnings of emerging violent conflict, enabling governments, NGOs and citizens to take action to prevent it escalating.” Read more