Open Knowledge 1.0
\nSaturday 17th March 2007
\nLimehouse Town Hall
\nhttp:\/\/www.okfn.org\/okforums\/okcon\/<\/p>\n
Discussions of ‘Open Knowledge’ often end with licensing wars: legal arguments, technicalities, and ethics. While those debates rage on, Open Knowledge 1.0. will concentrate on two pragmatic and often-overlooked aspects of Open Knowledge: atomisation and commercial possibility.<\/p>\n
Atomisation on a large scale (such as in the Debian ‘apt’ packaging system) has allowed large software projects to employ an amazing degree of decentralised, collaborative and incremental development. But what other kinds of knowledge can be atomised? What are the opportunities and problems of this approach for forms of knowledge other than Software?<\/p>\n
Atomisation also holds a key to commercial opportunity: unrestricted access to an ever-changing, atomised landscape of knowledge creates commercial opportunities that are not available with proprietary
\napproaches. What examples are there of commercial systems that function with Open Knowledge, and how can those systems be shared?<\/p>\n
Bringing together Open threads from Science, Geodata, Civic Information and Media, Open Knowledge 1.0 is an opportunity for people and projects to meet, talk and build things.<\/p>\n
Each thread will have speakers to set the scene, with the rest of theday divided between open space formats and workshop activities.<\/p>\n
If you have a presentation or a workshop you would like to give in the open space, or you would like to help organise Open Knowledge 1.0, please get in touch.<\/p>\n
Atomization: the Fourth Principle of Open Data Development ==========================================================<\/pre>\nConsider the way software has evolved to be highly atomized into\npackages\/libraries. Doing this allows one to \"divide and\nconquer\" the organizational and conceptual problems of highly\ncomplex systems. Even more importantly it allows for greatly increased\nlevels of reuse.\n\nA request to install a single given package can result in the\nautomatic discovery and installation of all packages on which that one\ndepends. The result may be a list of tens or even hundreds of\npackages in a graphic demonstration of the way in which computer\nprograms have been broken down into interdependent components.\n\nAtomization on a large scale (such as in the Debian apt packaging\nsystem) has allowed large software projects to employ an amazing\ndegree of decentralised, collaborative and incremental development.\nBut what other kinds of knowledge can be atomised? What are the\nopportunities and problems of this approach for forms of knowledge\nother than Software?\n\nAtomization also holds a key to commercial opportunity: unrestricted\naccess to an ever-changing, atomised landscape of knowledge creates\ncommercial opportunities that are not available with proprietary\napproaches. What examples are there of commercial systems that\nfunction with Open Knowledge, and how can those systems be shared?\n\nOKFN is supporting software allowing the incremental, decentralised,\ncollaborative and atomised production of open data. KnowledgeForge is\none Open Knowledge Foundation project to provide a platform for\ncollaborative data development and distribution. The \"Open\nShakespeare\" project is a prototype distribution of public domain\ninformation with utilities for annotating and cross-referencing it.\n\n--------------------------------------------------------------\n\nLetter from Geospatial: Open Standards, Open Data, Open Source\n==============================================================\n\nThe \"open standards, open data, open source\" mantra is not unique to\nthe geospatial community, but is core to it. Due to our high degree of\nspecialisation, socialisation and closeness to data, the open source\ngeospatial community has \"incubated\" some concerns that are coming to\nbe apparent in domains where software, knowledge and scientists are\nnot yet so close together.\n\nOur standards consortium is like a networking club for proprietary\ninterests; its recent specifications are baggy monsters, filled with\nextensions largely concerning access rights, limits and payment\nmechanisms. Their older, core standards for RESTful web services *<\/span>are*<\/span><\/strong>\nwidely used, and have helped the geospatial community to a new level\nof \"interoperability\", as it is still quaintly known.\n\nThe new wave of web-based \"neogeography\" drove the development of\ncommunity-based specifications for the simple exchange of geographic\ninformation have become de facto standards. There has been an\nimplementation-driven focus from open source projects seeking to make\nit easier to contribute, distribute and maintain open licensed\ngeographic information. Now our standards organisation has the bright\nidea of a \"mass market\", \"lightweight\" standards programme to harness\nthe energy in this activity. Their established membership, with a lot\nof time vested in the matter, are not happy with this.\n\nIn the decision-making bodies following the advice of traditional\ndomain experts, much issue is made of \"discovery\", \"catalog services\"\nand \"service discovery services\". Among the \"grassroots\" at the nexus\nof open source, open standards and open data there is a call for a\n\"geospatial web\" approach, re-using as much as possible existing\ndistribution mechanisms and toolkits, RSS\/Atom in particular.\n\nISO standards for information exchange are not solving the problems\nfaced by the geospatial community. Yet they are being embedded in\ninternational law; \"risk management\" and disaster recovery provide a\nbig political drive for exchanging more geographic information.\nThrough the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, the community is\nattempting to influence decision-making bodies through the strength of\nthe open source \/ open data approach. \"Open\" standards are a gateway\nto this, and it is a sad day when our official specification for\nmetadata exchange is an \"add to my shopping basket\" page.\n\nThere's always a lack of emphasis on contribution; transaction and\nfeedback are an afterthought. The traditional theory of \"Public\nParticipation GIS\" comes closer to implementable reality.\n\"Collaborative mapping\" projects producing open licensed data are\nbecoming the stuff of business plans. The ISO moves in glacial time;\nit would be of benefit to shorten the circuit.\n\nHow can we bring good status to \"complementary specifications\"?\nCan we use open source software to influence decision-makers?\nCan we help provide a good data licensing precedent for others?\nDo our distributed storage and query problems look like yours?<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open Knowledge 1.0 Saturday 17th March 2007 Limehouse Town Hall http:\/\/www.okfn.org\/okforums\/okcon\/ Discussions of ‘Open Knowledge’ often end with licensing wars: legal arguments, technicalities, and ethics. While those debates rage on, Open Knowledge 1.0. will concentrate on two pragmatic and often-overlooked aspects of Open Knowledge: atomisation and commercial possibility. Atomisation on a large scale (such as…Read more Open Knowledge 1.0, 17th March 2007<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dorothea.tv\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dorothea.tv\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dorothea.tv\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dorothea.tv\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dorothea.tv\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dorothea.tv\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dorothea.tv\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dorothea.tv\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dorothea.tv\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}