Zzzoot

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

Yalta and Yalta 2010 ( " Should Economists Use Open Source Software for Doing Research? ") examine the reliability, accuracy and bug fixing time for an Open Source econometric software package and five commercial econometric software packages. They find that after 5 years many of the bugs in the commercial software have not been fixed, whereas similar bugs in the Open Source software are fixed and released within a week of the discovery of the bugs. Building on the work done by McCullough in 2004 applying a set of tests called Wilkinson's tests to the five commercial software packages, they re-apply these tests to the new versions of the commercial software, and apply the tests to the Open Source econometrics software Gretl . The idea behind the Yalta and Yalta paper is to evaluate the bug fix time of the Open Source software, and compare this to the fixes -- if any -- and their times, that have been applied to the commercial software, since the 2004 McCullough paper...

The Journal of Map And Geography Libraries has a special issue Preservation of Digital Geospatial Materials (Volume 6 Issue 1 2010) . Papers describe a national level effort, a state effort, and a complex multi-state effort. All three projects are funded by the U.S. National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) : The National Geospatial Digital Archive: A Collaborative Project to Archive Geospatial Data . Tracey Erwin, Julie Sweetkind-Singer. The North Carolina Geospatial Data Archiving Project:Challenges and Initial Outcomes . Steven P. Morris GeoMAPP: A Geospatial Multistate Archive and Preservation Partnership . Alec Bethune, Butch Lazorchak, Zsolt Nagy

Data, data everywhere The Economist , 00130613, 2/27/2010, Vol. 394, Issue 8671 All too much: Monstrous amounts of data

"*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...

Sociological implications of scientific publishing: Open access, science, society, democracy, and the digital divide Ulrich Herb. First Monday , Volume 15, Number 2 - 1 February 2010 Claims for open access are mostly underpinned with science–related arguments (open access accelerates scientific communication); financial arguments (open access relieves the serials crisis); social arguments (open access reduces the digital divide); democracy–related arguments (open access facilitates participation); and, socio–political arguments (open access levels disparities). Using sociological concepts and notions, this article focuses strongly on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of (scientific) capital and its implications for the acceptance of open access, Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis and the implications of open access for the concept of the digital divide. Bourdieu’s theory of capital implies that the acceptance of open access depends on the logic of power and the accumulation of ...

In the recent editorial ( Am Nat 2010. Vol. 175, pp. 145–146 ) of The American Naturalist , it was announced that the journals " The American Naturalist , Evolution , the Journal of Evolutionary Biology , Molecular Ecology , Heredity , and other key journals in evolution and ecology..." would be introducing data archiving policies supporting access, re-use and long term preservation. These policies are to be put in place in one year, and the example policy for the The American Naturalist is given: This journal requires, as a condition for publication, that data supporting the results in the paper should be archived in an appropriate public archive, such as GenBank, TreeBASE, Dryad , or the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. Data are important products of the scientific enterprise, and they should be preserved and usable for decades in the future. Authors may elect to have the data publicly available at time of publication, or, if the technology of the archive allow...