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 !!!

My earlier entry/rant, It's not Open Data, so stop calling it that... about the non-Open Data nature of a number of Canadian cities' Open Data initiatives is supported by the just released Ten Principles for Opening Up Government Information from the Sunlight Foundation . Specifically: 6. Non-discrimination "Non-discrimination" refers to who can access data and how they must do so. Barriers to use of data can include registration or membership requirements. Another barrier is the uses of "walled garden," which is when only some applications are allowed access to data. At its broadest, non-discriminatory access to data means that any person can access the data at any time without having to identify him/herself or provide any justification for doing so. 8. Licensing The imposition of "Terms of Service," attribution requirements, restrictions on dissemination and so on acts as barriers to public use of d...

While it is a great positive change that data is being released through numerous efforts around the world, data release is not the same as Open Data release . A number of Canadian cities have announced Open Data initiatives, but they are not releasing Open Data. They are just releasing data. Of course, this is better than not releasing data. But let's at least be honest about what we are doing. Why aren't they Open Data? Because their licenses are not Open Data licenses: Not Open Data : Edmonton: " The City may, in its sole discretion, cancel or suspend your access to the datasets without notice and for any reason ..." - from Terms of Use Not Open Data : Vancouver: "The City may, in its sole discretion, cancel or suspend your access to the datasets without notice and for any reason..." - Terms of Use Not Open Data : Ottawa: " The City may, in its sole discretion, cancel or suspend your access to the datasets without notice and f...

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

"*pybctc* is a python package that makes access to British Columbia Transmission Corporation (BCTC) electric data easier. The British Columbia Transmission Corporation is a crown corporation with a mandate to plan, build, and operate the province of British Columbia's electricity transmission system. It publishes valuable information on electicity generation, transmission, and consumption to its website. This information is useful for many purposes including economic analysis, power trading, electric system study, and forecasting. The first step in using such information is to download it an parse it into useful data structures - a task performed by this library. The processed data normally will feed statistical methods, heuristics, and system models to provide a useful analysis of the British Columbia electric system. The *pybctc* project is hosted at http://bitbucket.org/kc/pybctc The data this library accesses can be found here: B.C. Transmission Corp historical trans...

The report Harnessing Openness to Improve Research, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (A Report by the Digital Connections Council of the Committee for Economic Development Committee, 2009 ISBN #0-87186-184-7) has some very relevant sections dealing with Open Access and Open Data in the context of higher education and the research process: Chapter 5. Openness in Higher Education: Changes in Research a. Resistance to Greater Openness b. Openness and Open-Access Journals c. Digital Repositories d. Educating Faculty Members on Their Intellectual Property Rights e. Openness and Commercial Support of Research f. Access to Government-Funded Research Results g. Openness and University Libraries h. Openness and Academic Presses i. Openness and Technology Transfer Of particular interest to those who - perhaps at a more general level - are working on getting better access to government funded research , are the following recommendations on this particular issue: f. Access to Governme...

Chapter 14 ( Measuring the Social and Economic Costs of Public Sector Information Online: A Review of the Literature and Future Directions by Paul F. Uhlir, Raed M. Sharif, and Tilman Merz) of The Socioeconomic Effects of Public Sector Information (PSI) on Digital Networks has a useful bibliography of useful links in this area. I have reproduced the bibliography portion of the chapter below: Models of Public Sector Information Provision via Trading Funds . David Newbery, Lionel Bently, and Rufus Pollock. 2008. EcoGeo Project . Stéphane Roche, et al. 2007 . Fair Use in the U.S. Economy: Economic Contribution of Industries Relying on Fair Use . Thomas Rogers and Andrew Szamosszegi. 2007. The Power of Information: An Independent Review . Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg. 2007. The Socio-Economic Impact of the Spatial Data Infrastructure of Catalonia . Pilar Garcia Almirall, Montse Moix Bergadà, and Pau Queraltó Ros. Edited by Max Craglia. 2007; published 2008. Benefits of the New ...

The very brilliant Rod Page (of whom I've blogged previously ) has made a very cool time/map visualization mashup showing confirmed and suspected cases. The application uses the RSS feeds from the original 2009 Swine Flu Outbreak Map .

ICSTI2009 "Managing Data for Science" Conference From the site: ICSTI's 2009 Public conference will take place on June 9 and 10, 2009 at Library and Archives Canada, 395 Wellington Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Speakers from Canada, the United States and Europe will address: How eScience affects the way libraries, publishers and scientists relate to each other. How the era of "big data" will enable enhanced experimentation and collaboration in science. The program includes presentations from: Francine Berman San Diego Super-Computing Center, California Richard Boulderstone Director of e-Strategy and Programmes British Library, UK Jan Brase German National Library of Science and Technology, EU Lee Dirks Microsoft, State of Washington Peter Fox Rensselaer Polytechnic University, State of New York Paula Hurtubise Project Manager Carleton University, Ottawa Liz Lyon UKOLN University of Bath, UK James Mullins Purdue...

The latest Nature -- Vol 455(7209), 4 September 2008 -- is a special issue on " Big Data ". Articles (& editorial) include: Editorial (2008). Community cleverness required Nature, 455 (7209), 1-1 DOI: 10.1038/455001a David Goldston (2008). Big data: Data wrangling Nature, 455 (7209), 15-15 DOI: 10.1038/455015a Cory Doctorow (2008). Big data: Welcome to the petacentre Nature, 455 (7209), 16-21 DOI: 10.1038/455016a Mitch Waldrop (2008). Big data: Wikiomics Nature, 455 (7209), 22-25 DOI: 10.1038/455022a Clifford Lynch (2008). Big data: How do your data grow? Nature, 455 (7209), 28-29 DOI: 10.1038/455028a Sue Nelson (2008). Big data: The Harvard computers Nature, 455 (7209), 36-37 DOI: 10.1038/455036a Doug Howe, Maria Costanzo, Petra Fey, Takashi Gojobori, Linda Hannick, Winston Hide, David P. Hill, Renate Kania, Mary Schaeffer, Susan St Pierre, Simon Twigger, Owen White, Seung Yon Rhee (2008). Big data: The future of biocuration Nature, 455 (7209), 47-50 DOI: 10.103...

ChemStar (Computed Molecular Data) is an Open Access database of the calculated chemical properties of over 12M substances from PubChem. The process - which demands significant computing power - was done is a distributed fashion using JavaRMI and is described in the paper below. The properties are calculated using three different methods: JChem , JOELIB and MOE . The site allows the perusal of the properties, with a Marvin -based applet for viewing structures. The Java sourcecode for the distributed computing is available . Karthikeyan, M., Krishnan, S., Pandey, A.K., Bender, A., Tropsha, A. (2008). Distributed Chemical Computing Using ChemStar: An Open Source Java Remote Method Invocation Architecture Applied to Large Scale Molecular Data from PubChem. Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 48 (4), 691-703. DOI: 10.1021/ci700334f

This article takes the provocative (but well-argued) position that Creative Commons / FLOSS -type licensing applied to scientific data is too restrictive and that the default licensing model for this data should be that it be in the public domain. The arguments are quite convincing: I think I may be convinced... John Wilbanks. 2008. Public domain, copyright licenses and the freedom to integrate science . Journal of Science Communication 7 (2).

This Science Commons project looks at the restrictions on life science databases: Dulong de Rosnay, M. (2008). Check Your Data Freedom: A Taxonomy to Assess Life Science Database Openness . Nature Precedings DOI: 10.1038/npre.2008.2083.1 Abstract: Molecular biology data are subject to terms of use that vary widely between databases and curating institutions. This research presents a taxonomy of contractual and technical restrictions applicable to databases in life science. It builds upon research led by Science Commons demonstrating why open data and the freedom to integrate facilitate innovation and how this openness can be achieved. The taxonomy describes technical and legal restrictions applicable to life science databases, and its metadata have been used to assess terms of use of databases hosted by Life Science Resource Name (LSRN) Schema. While a few public domain policies are standardized, most terms of use are not harmonized, difficult to understand and impose controls that pre...

The Canadian Institutes for Health Research ( CIHR ) is hosting a Health Summit " Data Data Everywhere: Access and Accountability ", October 20-21 2008, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Here is the tentative program: Day 1 (October 21) Welcoming Remarks Alain Beaudet, President, CIHR Keynote Panel - Setting the Stage: Information Needs of the Health of Canadians Robyn Tamblyn Terry Sullivan, Chief Executive Officer, Cancer Care Ontario Penny Ballem, Chair, CIHR-IHSPR Health Information Summit Steering Committee Plenary Session 1: Secondary Use of Data: Different Perspectives Wendy Armstrong, Board Member, Consumers’ Association of Alberta Robert Ouellet, President Elect, Canadian Medical Association Dorothy Pringle, Professor Emeritus, Lawrence S. Bloomberg, Faculty of Nursing University of Toronto Jack Tu, Senior Scientist, Institute for Clinical Evaluative Studies Plenary Session 2: Ethics and Privacy William Lowrance, Consultant Pat Kosseim, General Counsel of the Office of the ...

" Is posting raw results online, for all to see, a great tool or a great risk? " Scientific American article . Read it. Nuff said.

Bret Taylor has a refreshing and rather simple (powerful) idea: Wikipedia for data . All kinds of data. From what I would consider scientific data, to census data to geographic data to TV listings to stock data to CD cover and track data to .....whatever. Cut out the lawyers and the licensing. Open Data for all to use and experiment with. Coming from a country where you have to buy census data (!!!), this is a wonderful idea. Spread the meme.

This looks like an interesting article ( Libraries in the Converging Worlds of Open Data, E-Research, and Web 2.0 , Stuart MacDonald, March/April issue of ONLINE magazine) but I don't have a subscription so I can't really comment much on it. Ironic that the abstract mentions Peter Suber's Open Access News blog.... ;-) Abstract: " The new forms of research enabled by the latest technologies bring about collaboration among researchers in different locations, institutions, and even disciplines. These new collaborations have two key features -- the prodigious use and production of data. This data-centric research manifests itself in such concepts as e-science, cyberinfrastructure, or e-research. Over the last decade there has been much discussion about the merits of open standards, open source software, open access to scholarly publications, and most recently open data. There are a range of authoritative weblogs that address the open movement, some of which include: 1. DC...

OA Librarian points out a press release from Dec 5 2007 a news release from Nature Publishing Group announcing that genome sequences: "Nature Publishing Group (NPG) announced today that is introducing a Creative Commons licence for original research articles publishing the primary sequence of an organism’s genome for the first time in any of the Nature journals." Of particular interest: "Wherever possible, NPG will apply the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike licence retrospectively [emphasis added] to original research articles reporting novel primary genome-wide sequences that have previously been published in Nature journals." Nature Editorial: Shared Genomes (Nature 450, 762 6 December 2007) It is good to see Nature trying to fill some of the leadership void in this area. Taxonomy, with a longer history in publishing, needs a similar effort, as pointed-out by Donat Agosti on the Taxacom mailing list (in reference to the NPG announcem...

I will be participating in this year's AAAS meeting in Boston with a presentation entitled " Canadian Initiative To Develop a National Strategy " at the session "Managing and Preserving Scientific Data: Emerging Perspectives on a Global Basis", moderated by Bonnie Carrol. The other presentations: U.S. National Initiatives: Strategic Plan for Scientific Data Management and Preservation. Christopher L. Greer, National Science Foundation, USA U.K. Initiatives and Perspectives on Managing and Preserving Scientific Data. Liz Lyon, University of Bath, UK European Framework: Promote Access and Preserve Research Results for Future Generations. Carlos Morais-Pires, European Commission

I must have been asleep this spring to have missed this interesting article, A Proposed Standard for the Scholarly Citation of Quantitative Data (M. Altman & G. King, D-Lib Magazine , March/April 2007, Volume 13 Number 3/4) which introduces a reasonable specification allowing the citation of quantitative data. This is a needed specification, which will hopefully increase the real (and perceived) value of datasets to researchers, the people who evaluate them and the people who fund them. This allows datasets to be a measurable metric by which a researcher's performance can be measured: through usage and peer-review. " We propose that citations to numerical data include, at a minimum, six required components. The first three components are traditional, directly paralleling print documents. ... Thus, we add three components using modern technology, each of which is designed to persist even when the technology changes: a unique global identifier, a universal numeric fingerpri...