Showing posts with label open knowledge foundation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open knowledge foundation. Show all posts

04 July 2011

The Open Knowledge Foundation Comes of Age

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) was launched just over seven years ago:

May 24th 2004: The Open Knowledge Foundation was launched today with explicit objectives to promote the openness of all forms of knowledge where knowledge is taken to include information, data and all other synonymous terms. In particular

To promote freedom of access, creation and dissemination of knowledge.

To develop, support and promote projects, communities and tools that foster and facilitate the creation, access to and dissemination of knowledge.

To campaign against restrictions both legal and non-legal on the creation, access to and dissemination of knowledge.

On Open Enterprise blog.

11 December 2009

Visualising Open Data

One of the heartening trends in openness recently has been the increasing, if belated, release of non-personal government data around the world. Even the UK is waking up to the fact that transparency is not just good democracy, but is good economics too, since it can stimulate all kinds of innovation based on mashups of the underlying data.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the more such data we have, the harder it is to understand what it means. Fortunately, there is a well-developed branch of computing that tries to deal with this problem: visualisation. That is, turning the reams of ungraspable numbers into striking images that can be taken in at a glance.

Of course, the problem here is that someone has to spend time and effort taking the numbers and turning them into useful visualisations. Enter the Open Knowledge Foundation, which today launches the self-explanatory site “Where Does My Money Go? - analysing and Visualising UK Public Spending” (disclaimer: I have recently joined the OKFN's Advisory Board, but had nothing to do with this latest project.)

Here's what the press release has to say about the new site:

Now more than ever, UK taxpayers will be wondering where public funds are being spent - not least because of the long shadow cast by the financial crisis and last week’s announcements of an estimated £850 billion price tag for bailing out UK banks. Yesterday’s pre-budget report also raises questions about spending cutbacks and how public money is being allocated across different key areas.

However, closing the loop between ordinary citizens and the paper-trail of government receipts is no mean feat. Relevant documents and datasets are scattered around numerous government websites - and, once located, spending figures often require background knowledge to interpret and can be hard put into context. In the UK there is no equivalent to the US Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, which requires official bodies to publish figures on spending in a single place. There were proposals for similar legislation in 2007, but these were never approved.

On Friday 11th December the Open Knowledge Foundation will launch a free interactive online tool for showing where UK public spending goes. The Where Does My Money Go? project allows the public to explore data on UK public spending over the past 6 years in an intuitive way using an array of maps, timelines and graphs. By means of the tool, anyone can make sense of information on public spending in ways which were not previously possible.

There's currently a prototype, and a list of the datasets currently analysed available as a Google Docs spreadsheet. There are some really cool interactive visualisations, but I can't point you to any of them because they are hidden within a Flash-based black box – one of the big problems with this benighted technology. Once HTML5 is finalised it will presumably be possible to move everything to this open format, which would be rather more appropriate for a site dedicated to open data.

That notwithstanding, it's great to see the flood of information being tamed in this way; I hope it's the forerunner of many more like it (other than its dependence on Flash, of course) as governments around the world continue to release more of their data hoards. Meanwhile, do take it for a spin and pass on any suggestions you have that might improve it.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

20 August 2008

Opening Up Democracy's Source Code

Given that the body of law forms a kind of source code for democracy, this is extremely good news:

We already have a substantial free legal web, but it is not joined up. We have the resources and the technologies to join it up — now — for the benefit of lawyers and the community at large. Those of us who have an interest in access to the law and justice and the efficient provision of legal services have a duty to make this happen.

There has in the past 18 months been a sea change in Government’s attitude to the provision of Public Sector Information (PSI) and the encouragement of user-generated services supporting government. In particular, the independent Power of Information Review recommended changes that have been substantially accepted by Government, who, through the Power of Information Task Force are now committed to making this happen.

The time has come to build the Free Legal Web.

More thoughts on what needs to be done from the Open Knowledge Foundation.

25 June 2008

Searching for the Truth About Search Engines

It has been clear since the mid 1990s that search engines are central to the Internet and its use. The rise of Google as the bellewether Net company has made their pivotal nature even more apparent. But there has been surprisingly little formal analysis of the dynamics of this market.

Step forward Rufus Pollock, well known to readers of this blog as the main driving force behind the Open Knowledge Foundation:


Internet search (or perhaps more accurately ‘web-search’) has grown exponentially over the last decade at an even more rapid rate than the Internet itself. Starting from nothing in the 1990s, today search is a multi-billion dollar business. Search engine providers such as Google and Yahoo! have become house-hold names, and the use of a search engine, like use of the Web, is now a part of everyday life. The rapid growth of online search and its growing centrality to the ecology of the Internet raise a variety of questions for economists to answer. Why is the search engine market so concentrated and will it evolve towards monopoly? What are the implications of this concentration for different ‘participants’ (consumers, search engines, advertisers)? Does the fact that search engines act as ‘information gatekeepers’, determining, in effect, what can be found on the web, mean that search deserves particularly close attention from policy-makers? This paper supplies empirical and theoretical material with which to examine many of these questions. In particular, we (a) show that the already large levels of concentration are likely to continue (b) identify the consequences, negative and positive, of this outcome (c) discuss the possible regulatory interventions that policy-makers could utilize to address these.

It has a handy short history of search engines, and then some rigorous economic analysis if you're into that sort of thing. (Via B2fxxx.)