Newsletters/1

[okfn-announce] Open Knowledge Foundation Newsletter No. 1 Fri Jun 1 10:36:20 BST 2007

Welcome to the first Open Knowledge Foundation newsletter. Following is a glimpse of what we've been up to in recent months.

OPEN KNOWLEDGE 1.0

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Open Knowledge 1.0 took place on Saturday 17th March at Limehouse Town Hall in London. Over 70 people came to hear the panels and participate in the open space. There were three main sessions on Open Geodata, Open Media and Open Civic and Scientific Information. Speakers included:

* Ed Parsons (Open Geomatics, ex- Ordnance Survey) * Steve Coast (Open Street Map) * Charles Arthur (Guardian) * Paula Ledieu (Magic Lantern) * Susana Noguero and Olivier Schulbaum (Platoniq) * Zoe Young (Transmission) * Tim Hubbard (Sanger Institute) * Peter Murray-Rust (Cambridge University) * John Sheridan (Office of Public Information)

Links to write-ups, blog posts, audio files and other material are available at:

http://www.okfn.org/okcon/after/

We are starting to plan next years OKCON. If you have any suggestions or would like to be involved, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

PUBLIC DOMAIN WORKS

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Public Domain Works is an open registry of artistic works that are in the public domain. The project aims to provide a database of metadata in a raw and reusable form.

In January, the kindly people at BBC Archives supplied our project with 1.8 gigs (over 1,000,000 items) of data, which includes, in particular, listings of antique recordings. In March the Open Rights Group joined the project.

Public Domain Works  Project Overview 

OPEN SHAKESPEARE

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Open Shakespeare was first released just over a year ago, and reached version 0.4 in April. The idea is to have the complete works of Shakespeare, ancillary information and a web interface in a form that is open in accordance with our Open Knowledge Definition (http://okd.okfn.org/). Recently our efforts have focused on improving its annotation system and concordance. To explore visit:

http://demo.openshakespeare.org/

We are currently looking for public domain material to supplement the works with, commentary on the texts, and help with the code and the web interface.

Open Shakespeare  Project Overview 

OPEN ECONOMICS

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Version 0.4 of Open Economics was released in April. It consists of a data store, a web interface, a python library, and a graphing tool. Currently you can explore figures related to patent registrations, crop prices, music sales, interest rates, price index and population growth.

Our main priorities are to add more data, and to work on the web interface.

Open Economics  Project Overview 

FURTHER INFORMATION

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If you would like to know more about our activities over the past year, you can look at our annual report and our active projects page. If you are interested in participating in any of the OKF's projects, please see our participate page, or join the OKF discuss list.

Annual Report 2006-7  Active Projects  Participate  OKF Discuss List 