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

The W3C has announced a new workshop, Using Open Data: policy modeling, citizen empowerment, data journalism. According to the article, “For many years, W3C has been a keen promoter of Open Data, fostering a culture in which public administrations make their data available, ideally in machine-processable formats. Many governments have embraced the idea with enthusiasm, setting up national data portals. As part of the FP7-funded Crossover Project, W3C and the European Commission are running a Workshop to ask a simple question: what is all the ‘new’ government open data being used for?” Read more

An article by Stéphane Corlosquet discusses some of the highlights from the recent schema.org workshop. Corlosquet writes, “One of the highlights of the workshop for me was the syntax break out session, where most of the key players of the microformats, RDFa and microdata communities were present. The room was full of people passionate about structured data, and the atmosphere was very relaxed and friendly. We exchanged our opinions and pros/cons about each syntax (more on that in a different post). The outcome was a rough consensus that the community needs to keep supporting multiple syntaxes, since they are currently all still evolving and learning from one another.”

Corlosquet continues, “I noticed on Monday that Google released a new version of the Google Rich Snippets testing tool which supports the schema.org types in RDFa. That’s a big deal for Drupal 7 which ships with native RDFa support. I’ve put together a screencast which shows how it is possible today to enable Rich Snippets on Drupal 7 using the schema.org module.” View the screencast above.

The W3C has announced a workshop on Linked Enterprise Data in December. The announcement states, “Linked Data technology offers huge potential for enterprise applications such as the integration and the management of data within and across enterprises. The distributed nature of Linked Data enables loose-coupling for data sharing within and between organizations. With Linked Data, enterprises have a unique opportunity to cooperate in their use of shared data without the costs of extensive coordination.” Read more