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.” Read more

Dan Jellinek reports that, “The open data movement needs to be driven and managed more by what people want to find out, and less by public bodies’ own agendas, the online democracy pioneer Tom Steinberg told last week’s Open-Data Cities Conference in Brighton.” Steinberg stated, “A lot of the attitude around open data is what can we give away, what can we give out?…  Then they say ‘no-one seems to be using it, let’s have a hackday, see if we can create incentives.’ Meanwhile in the freedom of information department there is a pile of requests building up that won’t go away based on real desires – someone really wants to know something.” Read more

The Open Data Cities Conference happened last Friday, and Adam Tinworth was on hand. He has provided informative recaps of several of the presentations on One Man and His Blog. One of the most intriguing is his recap of Emer Coleman’s reflections on her experience building the London Data Store. Tinworth reports that the first lesson Coleman learned was “It was never about the data.” He writes, “The conversations are not about data – they’re about the threat it was to the public sector. It creates a totally different approach to governance, so you gave have mature conversations with the electorate, who have the same data that government does. You move from the tyranny of the experts to the wisdom of the crowds. But that’s uncomfortable for back office statisticians who have not been used to being in the public gaze.” Read more

Ivan Herman recently offered a recap of some of the most intriguing presentations at the recent Linked Data on the Web Workshop in Lyon. Herman writes, “Giuseppe Rizzo made a presentation related to all the tools we know have to tag texts and thereby being able to use these resources in linked data (“NERD meets NIF: Lifting NLP Extraction Results to the Linked Data Cloud”), i.e., the Zemanta or Open Calais services of this World. As these services become more and more important, having a clear view of what they can do, how one can use them individually or together, etc., is essential. Their project, called NERD, will become an important source for this community, bookmark that page.” Read more

Eric Hoffer, a regular contributor to our SemanticLink podcasts, has commented on the most recent episode (available here). Hoffer notes, “Our latest Semantic-Link discussion was interesting in that it touched on some distinct but deep topics that tend to recur in our discussions, namely: usability, privacy and the old standby – the definition of semantics itself. I won’t spend any more time on the definition of semantics beyond that the consensus (for purposes of this discussion) was that it means ‘meaning’, with contexts including: linguistic/NLP related word-meaning semantics; and the other being compliance with W3C standards – or architectural Semantics.  In essence, the latter is what enables a machine version of the former.” Read more

The Semantic Web Media Summit on September 14 in New York was a great success, a recent article reports. This review of the event covers several sessions including Michael Dunn’s keynote and Mike Petit’s “call to action.” According to the article, Petit noted that “(1) The Semantic Web and its associated technology have become tangible and effective tools for publishers, and (2) Social media have complicated the publishing model and have become indispensable.” Read more