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 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?
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
approaches. What examples are there of commercial systems that function with Open Knowledge, and how can those systems be shared?
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.
Each thread will have speakers to set the scene, with the rest of theday divided between open space formats and workshop activities.
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.
Atomization: the Fourth Principle of Open Data Development ==========================================================
Consider the way software has evolved to be highly atomized into packages/libraries. Doing this allows one to "divide and conquer" the organizational and conceptual problems of highly complex systems. Even more importantly it allows for greatly increased levels of reuse. A request to install a single given package can result in the automatic discovery and installation of all packages on which that one depends. The result may be a list of tens or even hundreds of packages in a graphic demonstration of the way in which computer programs have been broken down into interdependent components. Atomization 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? Atomization 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 approaches. What examples are there of commercial systems that function with Open Knowledge, and how can those systems be shared? OKFN is supporting software allowing the incremental, decentralised, collaborative and atomised production of open data. KnowledgeForge is one Open Knowledge Foundation project to provide a platform for collaborative data development and distribution. The "Open Shakespeare" project is a prototype distribution of public domain information with utilities for annotating and cross-referencing it. -------------------------------------------------------------- Letter from Geospatial: Open Standards, Open Data, Open Source ============================================================== The "open standards, open data, open source" mantra is not unique to the geospatial community, but is core to it. Due to our high degree of specialisation, socialisation and closeness to data, the open source geospatial community has "incubated" some concerns that are coming to be apparent in domains where software, knowledge and scientists are not yet so close together. Our standards consortium is like a networking club for proprietary interests; its recent specifications are baggy monsters, filled with extensions largely concerning access rights, limits and payment mechanisms. Their older, core standards for RESTful web services *are* widely used, and have helped the geospatial community to a new level of "interoperability", as it is still quaintly known. The new wave of web-based "neogeography" drove the development of community-based specifications for the simple exchange of geographic information have become de facto standards. There has been an implementation-driven focus from open source projects seeking to make it easier to contribute, distribute and maintain open licensed geographic information. Now our standards organisation has the bright idea of a "mass market", "lightweight" standards programme to harness the energy in this activity. Their established membership, with a lot of time vested in the matter, are not happy with this. In the decision-making bodies following the advice of traditional domain experts, much issue is made of "discovery", "catalog services" and "service discovery services". Among the "grassroots" at the nexus of open source, open standards and open data there is a call for a "geospatial web" approach, re-using as much as possible existing distribution mechanisms and toolkits, RSS/Atom in particular. ISO standards for information exchange are not solving the problems faced by the geospatial community. Yet they are being embedded in international law; "risk management" and disaster recovery provide a big political drive for exchanging more geographic information. Through the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, the community is attempting to influence decision-making bodies through the strength of the open source / open data approach. "Open" standards are a gateway to this, and it is a sad day when our official specification for metadata exchange is an "add to my shopping basket" page. There's always a lack of emphasis on contribution; transaction and feedback are an afterthought. The traditional theory of "Public Participation GIS" comes closer to implementable reality. "Collaborative mapping" projects producing open licensed data are becoming the stuff of business plans. The ISO moves in glacial time; it would be of benefit to shorten the circuit. How can we bring good status to "complementary specifications"? Can we use open source software to influence decision-makers? Can we help provide a good data licensing precedent for others? Do our distributed storage and query problems look like yours?