Open Data

Cambridge Geek Night 2011-02-14

Rufus Pollock

[Open Knowledge Foundation]
[Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow]
Licensed under cc-by v3.0 (any jurisdiction)

Open Knowledge Foundation Shuttleworth Foundation

About the Foundation

Open Knowledge Foundation

Founded 2004 / Not-for-profit

Promoting, Creating Disseminating Open Knowledge

http://www.okfn.org/vision/

(My) Motivation

To Know and Understand Things (Better)

Such as ...

Where Does Our Money Go When We Pay Taxes?

Wouldn't it be nice to know (and show) exactly where every £ € $ went to ...

www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org

Where Does My Money Go

Requires gov spend (local + national), region codes, company info ...
(Much of which is locked up in pdfs or isn't available)

We Need the Data Raw and We Need the Data Now

http://blog.okfn.org/2007/11/07/give-us-the-data-raw-and-give-it-to-us-now/

CKAN: Find, Share and Reuse Data

ckan.net

Started http://ckan.net/ in 2007, now 1500+ open data 'packages'. More than a dozen other CKAN instances around the world.

Data.Gov.UK: Open Government Data

data.gov.uk

The Official UK Gov Catalogue (also powered by CKAN)

What?

What is 'Open'?

Open Knowledge Definition

Open Knowledge Definition

Open Knowledge Definition

Open = Freedom to Use / Re-use / Redistribute

http://www.opendefinition.org/

What Data?

Geographical, Statistical, Electoral-Legal, Financial ...

Key Point: Non-Personal

Why?

light bulb

Understand and Discover Faster

Whether that's: the best way to travel to work / what stock to buy / the impact of global warming ...

(And enabling the development of tools and services to do these things – could Google exist without an 'open' web)

But ...
Where Does the Open Data Come In?

Information is Special: Non-Rivalrous

Very cheaply copied ~ zero cost

Giving me a 'copy' of your car is a problem, giving me a copy of your data isn't

Componentization and Scaling
(Closed Data Doesn't Scale!)

Woven Ball Broken Humpty
We are Building Large, Complex (Information) Systems – Weaving Data Together To Scale We Need to Componentize - Break Things Up into Reusable Pieces But We Need to Put Humpty-Dumpty Together Again - Hard (or Impossible) if Closed

The Many Minds Principle

The Best Thing to do With Your Data will be Thought of by Someone Else

Enables a Read/Write Society

read/write society

Open data means anyone can access, analyse and contribute. No longer confined to passive consumption we can 'write' back - adding, adapting, and updating.

Data (and Content) are a Platform – You Build on Them!

Building the Open Data Ecosystem

yingyang

How Do We Scale?
(In the 'Open' Community)

Sharing, Reworking, Improving, Learning

The 3 S's: Search, Storage and Services

At the Moment We're Too Happy With Closed

From Google to Facebook

Componentized, Distributed, Collaborative
Building 'The Debian of Data'

Creating the tools and community to make it a reality
From http://ckan.net/, 'datapkg' to an 'open-base'

Thank-You

Rufus Pollock
rufus.pollock [at] okfn [dot] org

http://okfn.org/ http://ckan.net/ http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/

Credits 

lego.jpg: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oskay/265899811/
humpty_dumpty.jpg: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aussiegall/298669543/
woven_ball.jpg: http://www.flickr.com/photos/exfordy/387876530/sizes/s/
sim_city_airport.jpg: http://www.flickr.com/photos/42183741@N05/3890767674/in/photostream/
thomas_jefferson.jpg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_Peale-Thomas_Jefferson.jpg
twenty_pound_notes.jpg: http://www.flickr.com/photos/howardlake/3855243553/ 
coal_face.jpg: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/3906406487/ 
itoworld-openstreetmap-2009.jpg: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterito/3054501076/
light_buld.png: http://www.openclipart.org/image/800px/svg_to_png/Anonymous_light_bulb.png