devlog

Saul suggested that we run a “Open Social Graph” session at next year’s Open Knowledge Foundation conference. Great! I thought. Hang on, what’s an open social graph?
Bread Fitzpatrick sets out some broad assumptions and goals about this open social graph effort. It’s a reaction to user annoyance at having to recreate a “social network” on […]

Sadly enough the word “metadata” still acts on me like catnip on cats, then the words “data licensing” put a seal on it, I feel impelled to go and poke my nose in other people’s business. The business in question was that of Re:Transmission, a gathering of independent video producers held in London, and their […]

I flicked through a lot of pictures taken at etech on flickr , and the ones that drew my attention were taken by, or taken of, people i knew. When pictures were unlabelled, especially if i didn’t recognise people in other pictures taken by the same person, i gave less attention to the pictures i […]

I was glad i caught the first Open Knowledge Forum last week, featuring developers from theyworkforyou, public whip, iCan and writetothem.
Between them, they have good points and proven use cases for why we just need the raw data, in a structured format, openly available without supplication.

Public information providers save money.
Dropping raw data on a web […]

after a brief wikipedia ramble i found myself at the distributed proofreaders europe site, almost as if wikipedia was expelling me to go do something more constructive instead.
DP is a feeder project for the free ‘etexts’ at project gutenberg; organisers scan out-of-copyright texts, and submit the batch of pages with best-effort OCR scans, which are […]

Recently i was doing some research on the re-use of Listed Buildings . buildings of historical interest which have legal protection - in East London. So, i thought, i’ll download the list of listed buildings in Tower Hamlets, and then i’ll… Then, i hit the brick wall that is public sector information policy, very hard.
To […]

A few months ago i wrote a piece about the eurospatial cartel, which in its consultation process for the European Commission, overlooked the very clear and strong case for open access to state-collected geodata. Belatedly, i discovered that many of the recommendations in the INSPIRE documents have been collated into what is now going through […]