supported by The Open Economics Working Group is inviting PhD students and academics with relevant experience and research focus to participate in the first Open Economics Workshop, which would take place on December 17-18, 2012 in Cambridge, UK. The aim of the workshop is to build an understanding of the value of open data and […]
Europeana has recently released a new version of its Linked Data Pilot, data.europeana.eu. We now publish data for 2.4 million objects under an open metadata licence: CC0, the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. This post elaborates on this earlier one by Naomi Lillie on the Open Biblio site. Linked Open Data from europeana on Vimeo. […]
The following post is by Velichka Dimitrova, Coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group and Hristo Alajdov, Associate Professor at Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. One of the key problems in natural science research is the lack of effective collaboration. A lot of research is conducted by scientists from different disciplines, […]
BibSoup is here! And it’s going to revolutionise how you work with bibliographic metadata. The team has been coding and blogging and bugfixing for a while now on the BibServer software, and we’ve mentioned in passing that our own instance has been up and running under the name of BibSoup… Now we are officially launching […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. It is cross-posted from jonathangray.org. Since finally blogging about OpenPhilosophy.org last month I’ve been thinking about how one could make a generic open source platform that could be used to power it, and other things like it. Enter ‘TEXTUS’: TEXTUS is […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Earlier this year at OKCon 2011 in Berlin we launched datacatalogs.org to make a comprehensive list of open data catalogs around the world. We’ve just upgraded it to run on the latest version of CKAN, our open source data hub software, […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. How can we encourage more galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM institutions) to open up their holdings – including metadata about their collections, and digital copies of works which have entered the public domain? Following on from my post on opening […]
This guest post is written by Carl Grant, chief librarian at Ex Libris and past president of Ex Libris North America, in answer to some questions that Adrian Pohl, coordinator of the OKFN Working Group on Open bibliographic Data, posed in the beginning of July in response to Ex Libris’ announcement of an “Expert Advisory […]
The following post is from Mark MacGillivray, who works with the OKF on our Open Bibliography project and other related projects. Today the JISC called for all metadata to be openly accessible, inviting all publicly funded organisations including universities, colleges, libraries, museums and archives to make the same commitment. The OKF is proud to have […]
The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. I’ve recently been thinking about the role the Open Knowledge Foundation can play in helping to open up the public domain. Ultimately I think we should help to rally existing stakeholders from around the world behind a simple vision, and encourage […]
This post was written by participants of the LOD-LAM Summit which was held on June 2nd/3rd in San Francisco and is crossposted on the Creative Commons blog and the Open bibliography and Open Bibliographic Data blog. For author information see the list below the document. The library, archives and museums (i.e. LAM) community is increasingly […]
The following guest post is from Jim Michalko, VP in charge of the OCLC Research Library Partnership. Karen Calhoun, former VP of Metadata Applications, who has previously been working on these issues, has recently left OCLC to relocate and begin the first phase of her retirement. She has transitioned her role as OCLC’s spokesperson for […]
Last week I sat down with Primavera De Filippi, our new coordinator for the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain and we edited some footage we had shot at a meeting a while ago into a microshort film about the Public Domain Calculators. Public Domain Calculators from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo. […]
Last Thursday we had a Workshop on Open Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain in Berlin (as we blogged about here and here). It was a great opportunity for movers and shakers from the world of open bibliographic data to meet in person, and to discuss various projects, policies, standards and initiatives relating to making […]
As regular readers of the Open Knowledge Foundation blog will know, bibliographic metadata is a subject close to our heart (see e.g., here, here and here). Hence we were delighted to see today’s announcement that CERN Library are releasing their bibliographic metadata under an open license! From the announcement: Librarians are in general very favourable […]
We’re very pleased to see that a large collection of German language digital texts has just been released under an open license. Yesterday, it was announced that Wikimedia Germany, Creative Commons Germany and TextGrid are releasing a large collection of “culturally valuable” texts either in the public domain or under a CC-BY license, which is […]
MusicBrainz is a user-maintained community music metadatabase. The MusicBrainz community collects and maintains data about recorded music releases such as artist name, release title and track listing. That data is re-used by music services across the web, including Amazon and Last.fm, as well as in Free and Open Source Software applications. Robert Kaye is Executive […]
On the first of January every year works from around the world fall out of copyright and into the public domain. But, how do we know which works fall into the public domain when? In previous years there have been blog posts about this – for example, see the Everybody’s Libraries posts from 1st January […]
Our Open Data and Semantic Web workshop is coming up next Friday 13th November in London, kindly sponsored by Talis. In preparation for the workshop, we have started a Linking Open Data group on CKAN, our open-source registry of open data, based on the new group feature we announced last week. We currently have 83 […]
There have recently been several posts about what features are desirable in government data catalogues. The Sunlight Foundation recently announced they are planning to build on data.gov to allow “community participation so that people can submit their own data sources” (including support for adding data that is not open such as data with noncommercial restrictions). […]
We’re pleased to announce that slides, audio and photos from OKCon 2009 are now available at: http://okfn.org/okcon/2009/after Speakers included: Mark Charmer, AKVO Vinay Gupta, Appropedia Simon Parrish, Aidinfo + Karin Christiansen, PublishWhatYouFund Tom Scott, BBC Jeni Tennison, London Gazette + RDFa Leigh Dodds, Talis David Bollier, OnTheCommons + Author of Viral Spiral If you have […]
The Community College Open Textbook Project, California Digital Marketplace, and the Open Knowledge Foundation invite those with an interest in open textbooks to a meeting on Wednesday, May 20th at 1330-1530 pm PDT (2130-2330 GMT or 2230-0030 CET). The meeting will be primarly focused on metadata, tagging, interoperability issues, and repository efforts for open textbooks. […]
We’re pleased to announce that Talis launched their Connected Commons for open data at OKCon 2009 on Saturday! The Talis Connected Commons scheme is intended to directly support the publishing and reuse of Linked Data in the public domain by removing the costs associated with those activities. The scheme is intended to support a wide […]
You may have heard that lcsh.info – which explored how Library of Congress Subject Headings could be represented as a Semantic Web application – was closed down last month. The good news is that there are now two new projects publishing library-related open data: http://ckan.net/package/read/iconclass http://ckan.net/package/read/hud-library-usagedata The first, ICONCLASS, is “an experimental service that makes […]
Biblios.net, “the world’s largest database of freely-licensed library records”, is now beta-testing. From their website: ‡biblios.net is a subscription-based, hosted version of the open-source ‡biblios metadata editor that we released earlier this year. In addition to the editor, ‡biblios.net includes some extended community features such as integrated real-time chat, forums, and private messaging. ‡biblios.net also […]
Back in June we solicited for assistance in a project to build a series of calculators to ‘map’ the public domain in different jurisdictions, by showing which works are out of copyright. There are now individuals and groups keen to contribute to the calculators in at least 10 countries: Argentina: Bienes Comunes Canada: Access Copyright […]
Melanie Dulong de Rosnay recently published an excellent paper on open data in the life sciences in Nature Precedings entitled Check Your Data Freedom: A Taxonomy to Assess Life Science Database Openness. From the abstract: Molecular biology data are subject to terms of use that vary widely between databases and curating institutions. This research presents […]
For a while we’ve been planning to help to produce a set of Public Domain Calculators – which each aim to indicate whether or not a given work is in the public domain in a given jurisdiction. The idea arose in relation to our Public Domain Works project (a registry of works in the public […]
The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) version 0.5 has just been released. Changes include: feature to list and search tags feature to make data available in machine-usable form via sql dump feature to purge a revision and associated changes support for reserved html characters in urls upgrade to Pylons 0.9.6 new spam management utilities including […]
Last week I went to the first COMMUNIA workshop on Technology and the Public Domain in Turin. COMMUNIA coordinator Juan Carlos De Martin and Rishab Ghosh of MERIT, University of Maastricht gave opening talks. I was on a panel with Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons, Nathan Yergler of Creative Commons and Keith Jeffery of euroCRIS. […]
A couple of weeks back we blogged about the ‘Future of Bibliographic Control’ draft report from a working group at the Library of Congress. Since then, we’ve submitted to the group a brief, collaboratively edited response to the draft and an appendix with some additional detailed comments. The response was drafted by the Open Knowledge […]
Last week I went to the OpenLearn 2007 conference hosted at the Open University. A lot was packed into the couple of days, and there was representation from different OER (Open Educational Resources) groups from around the world. There were an abundance of new projects, papers, groups and initiatives mentioned, and a recurring sentiment was […]
As some of you will know, Public Domain Works, a joint initiative of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Free Culture UK and the Open Rights Group, had its alpha launch back in August. The Public Domain Works Database is an open registry of artistic works that are in the public domain. Since the project was first […]
I dropped in for the last session of Re:Transmission event in London, on video metadata. This was a gathering for the Transmission network of independent video producers and distributors that is trying to move into standards-based, peer-based online distribution. This involves an effort to establish a simple common standard for video metadata distribution, right now […]
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