Zzzoot

At the International Open Government Data Conference (IOGDC) Tim Berners-Lee " ...reiterated his “ five star system ” for open government data : 1 Star for putting data on the Web at all, with an open license. 2 Stars if it’s machine-readable. 3 Stars for machine-readable, non-proprietary formats 4 Stars if the data is converted into open linked data standards like RDF or SPARQL 5 Stars when people have gone through the trouble of linking it " From: http://gov20.govfresh.com/open-data-accountability-citizen-utility-and-economic-opportunity/ Original TB-L ref: http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/star-scheme-by-example/ So according this metric by TB-L, the Canadian cites (Ottawa, Vancouver, Toronto,, Edmonton, etc) that have recently released data with not open licenses get ZERO stars !!!

Linked Open Data (LOD) Camp - The year open data went worldwide , by Tim Berners-Lee - Open data deployments in electronic Government , by Sandro Hawke - Linked data: What about privacy? , by Thomas Roessler - Linked Open Data: What about Applications? , by Ivan Herman - Selection of Topics of Discussion for the afternoon sessions Afternoon lightning talks subjects: Linked Open Drug Data eGov opportunities Health Care/Life Sciences opportunities Financial and Business Data Crawling the LOD with ldspider Wiki

As yet another newspaper "gets it" and launches an API (" Open Platform ") to its content (" Newspaper as a Platform: Guardian Launches API" - ReadWriteWeb), leveraging the creativity of the masses for the creation of mashups, mixins and just plain wonderful and wonky applications, I can only hope that the holders of significant scientific content, like scientific publishers and aggregators, will also move in this direction. Nature's OTMI seems a rather Web 1.0 inspired effort, and with limited usability at that (although Nature has stopped working on OTMI). Exposing research article contents (full text, metadata, citations, datasets, ontologies, etc) - even it be 6+ months old - to the world through a sensible (and maybe even shared/standard) API would create an explosion of mashups ranging from incredible researcher-oriented knowledge discovery tools to normal human being-oriented applications for finding things like as-yet-unreported possible da...

I am at the exciting and arcane code4lib 2009 conference here in Providence, Rhode Island. Right now at the pre-conference called LinkedData . on Linked Data . I had forgotten that Rhode Island and more specifically Providence, are the old stomping grounds (and location for many short stories and novels) of H.P. Lovecraft . And - this morning - I was talking to Ross Singer about this, and realised how this all made sense: when I first met Ross at an Access conference a number of years ago, the first thing I thought on meeting him was, " Chthulu "! He of course denied being one of the Elder Things and then levitated across the room from me. But I think this explains a lot of things... ;-) We will have to see what other Links I make at this conference. :-) Oh, BTW I will be giving a presentation tomorrow morning on LuSql . Feel free to drop in. :-)