Monday, November 22, 2010

The Open Government Data Movement

Last week I spend all my commuting hours to catch up with two busy Twitter streams on my iPhone: #iogdc and #ogdcamp

For three days the International Open Government Data Conference (iogdc), in Washington, D.C., gathered the community of data owners, developers and policy makers from around the globe to share lessons learned, stimulate new ideas, and demonstrate the power of democratizing data. For two days London was the meeting place for a more European focused audience in the Open Government Data Camp (ogdcamp).
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Alexander B. Howard from 
O’Reilly Media published a great blog post the second day in Washington that very well summarizes the whole week: Open data: accountability, citizen utility and economic opportunity.

In both conferences Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, described his “five star system” for open government data. From "one star" for making data available, often in pdf format. To "five stars" for linked data using the semantic web standard RDF (Resource Description Framework). What is required to get the ratings stars? See this excellent page: Linked Open Data star scheme by example.

In a five minute interview on YouTube with David Eaves, Public Policy Entrepreneur in Canada, on Open Government Data, gives his view on why is it important, what are the benefits, what should government do?




Two examples of what is happening in the Open Government sphere.
In my next blog post I will share some thoughts on what that this movement for Open Government Data in an Enterprise context.