Open Data News & Articles

After one week in the Apple App Store, Facebook has blocked a Yandex app called Wonder from accessing user data in the social search app's quest to help friends find what each other are doing, listening to and reading. Open web...yea right.

Could the key to better government lie in its mountains of already free and available data? 

If you have ever thought, “If I was defining standards, I would have never done it that way.” Here is your chance. Open standards organization the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) announced it is accepting participants for its newly created technical committee, the OASIS Open Data Protocol (OData) Technical Committee. The committee will be responsible for developing the first OASIS version of the OData standard.

They're from the government and they're here to help you. No, really. Some of the biggest collectors of data are the various governments, whether on a national, state and regional or local level. Increasingly, governments are making this data available to developers, who are using it to produce applications.

Don't believe everything you read on the Internet. Fortunately, when I write a story, I'm a bit anal about going to read the source materials. So when I came across a Slashdot post by Sara Chan claiming that "scientists at universities, which are all public in the UK, can now not claim data from publicly-funded research as their private property," I hunted down the ruling in question and gave it a read.

If your company or project is heavily involved in the open scene (open source, open data, open government, etc) then one conference you may want to consider for 2010 is the Open World Forum (news, site). Not only do you get a chance to hobnob with people working and thinking hard on how to further drive openness on many levels, you get to do it in Paris.

In the never-ending argument over which country is Number 1, the UK has just surpassed the US in one particular area: that of open data.

WCM Field Notes is a regular column written in collaboration with Jon Marks (@McBoof), Head of Development at LBi. This second issue looks at what Open Source really means, and suggests ways for you to sensibly include both open source and proprietary systems in your Content Management System selection exercise.