
Thinking about Open Data, with a little help from the Data Hub
Continuing to explore the adoption of explicit Open Data licenses, I’ve been having a trawl through some of the data in the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Data Hub. I’m disappointed – but not surprised – by the extent to which widely applicable Open Data licenses are (not!) being applied. For those who are impatient or already aware of the background, […]

Survey: How open is your data?
Back in 2006 as we rolled out the first public draft of the Talis Community Licence, the world of data licensing seemed a simple place. Today, the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Data Hub contains 3,888 data sets, many of which are explicitly licensed with respect to the Open Definition. But many are still not explicitly licensed. Over at […]

Open is good – but encouragement better than mandate
Image via Wikipedia Openness is undeniably cool right now, at least if you move in the slightly odd circles that I do. Openly available scientific papers are disrupting the world of scholarly publishing (which may not be all good, but that’s a post for another day). Openly available university courses are finally beginning to work […]

Licensing of Linked Data
As part of a workshop at this year’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), former colleague Leigh Dodds prepared an interesting diagram on the ways in which resources comprising the Linked Data Cloud are currently licensed. For various reasons, I was unable to make it to Virginia for the event, but a scan through the presentations […]