L'opendata

Open Data & the Local Newspaper Greg Hadfield recently commented on the effect that open data technologies are having on local newspapers. He writes, “For the last few years, much of my thinking has shifted from journalism and newspapers, to democracy, data, cities and start-ups. A barely articulated premise has been that one day – surely not too far away – there will be ubiquitous, free, high-speed internet access available to everybody via a myriad devices. Connectivity – and the ‘connectedness’ it engenders – will be the air we breathe. The world we inhabit will be an ‘internet of things’, of which all kinds of objects – not just computers, tablets and phones – will be a part.

Media Map Shows Impact of Information (December 5, 2011) How do we know that media make a difference? We’ve looked at the numbers. The Media Map Project, a multi-faceted research collaboration between Internews and The World Bank Institute, has made 25 data sets which collectively touch on every country in the world and up to 30 years' worth of information available to the public for download and analysis. Visualizations on the site allow viewers to interact with and test the data in different ways. Correlation between economic performance (GDP) and freedom of expression / freedom of the press For example:

Wikidata Wikidata (www.wikidata.org) aims to create a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike. It will provide data in all the languages of the Wikimedia projects and allow for the central access to data in a similar vein as Wikimedia Commons does for multimedia files. Wikidata is a new Wikimedia hosted and maintained project. The initial development of the project is funded with a generous donation by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence [ai]2, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and Google, Inc. Further information Online Data - ESRI ArcGIS Online Map Services Use these map services to create web maps in ArcGIS Online, or access them directly from ArcGIS for Desktop and ArcGIS for Server. Developers can access them through ArcGIS Web Mapping APIs to build web applications.

Introducing the DataStore A major new feature in the DataHub is good news for data wranglers. The DataStore allows users to store and load structured data into a database, where it can be queried, filtered, or accessed from other programs via a rich data API. The API is also used by CKAN’s inbuilt Recline Data Explorer, giving in-page previews of the data with full text search, filtering, sorting and graphing, as in the screenshots below: These new DataHub capabilities are powered by the recently enhanced DataStore and Data API functionality of our open-source CKAN data management system, which as well as powering the DataHub runs many other data portals including data.gov.uk. An introduction to the DataStore and Data API Data science We’ve all heard it: according to Hal Varian, statistics is the next sexy job. Five years ago, in What is Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly said that “data is the next Intel Inside.” But what does that statement mean? Why do we suddenly care about statistics and about data? In this post, I examine the many sides of data science — the technologies, the companies and the unique skill sets.

the 5 stars of open linked data While perusing the minutes of today’s w3c egov telecon I noticed mention of Tim Berners-Lee’s Bag of Chips talk at the gov2.0 expo last week in Washington, DC. I actually enjoyed the talk not so much for the bag-of-chips example (which is good), but for the examination of Linked Data as part of a continuum of web publishing activities associated with gold stars, like the ones you got in school. Here they are: I think it’s helpful to think of Linked Data in this context, and not to minimize (or trivialize) the effort and the importance of getting the first 3 stars. It was interesting that he didn’t mention RDF once (unless I missed it) and talked instead about Linked Data Format. Correction he did mention it, thanks Anders.

Big Data: A New Approach to Finding Info A breakthrough method to graphically represent knowledge enables software developers to easily build intelligent agents such as Apple's Siri and IBM Watson. Nov 16, 2011, San Diego, CA - Artificial intelligence vendor ai-one will unveil a new approach to graphically represent knowledge at the SuperData conference in San Diego on Wednesday. The discovery, named ai-Fingerprint, is a significant breakthrough because it allows computers to understand the meaning of language much like a person. UK Open Data Institute (Silicon Roundabout) Posted by Information Age on 28 November 2011 Share article