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Category Archives: Open Data

German Federal Government drafts open data law

Germany’s Federal Government wants to make administrative data accessible as the “raw material of the future” and has published a draft for an open data law. Unprocessed electronically stored data from federal authorities should be made available to the public free of charge, transparently and in a machine-readable format. The Federal Cabinet also wants to […]

Open data: French local authorities still lacking in will

A report (PDF) produced by Opendata France and sent to Axelle Lemaire, the Secretary of State for Digital Affairs and the Secretary of State for Local Authorities reveals that the use of open data in average size towns is still far from being widespread, today’s Le Monde Informatique reports. Bringing together the local authorities committed […]

Labour commits to open source

Yesterday the Labour Party’s digital democracy manifesto (PDF) was launched by embattled party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, The Register reports. For ordinary citizens perhaps the most significant feature is its universal service commitment. We will deliver high speed broadband and mobile connectivity for every household, company and organisation in Britain from the inner city neighbourhoods to […]

Bristol IoT developments

There’s a fair bit going on in Bristol at the moment as regards the Internet of Things (IoT) and these were reported on earlier this week by Nigel Legg, under the headline “Smart City done Smarter?“. Nigel’s post is reproduced in full below with his kind permission (with a couple of links added. Ed.). My […]

The People’s Code – Federal Source Code policy released by White House

Two days ago, Tony Scott, the U.S. Chief Information Officer, wrote on the White House blog that the Federal government was releasing the Federal Source Code policy (PDF) to support improved access to custom-developed Federal source code. The policy, which incorporates feedback from the public, requires any new custom-developed source code developed specifically by or […]

CERN’s 300 TB – the biggest open data release yet?

Yesterday a press release from CERN announced that its CMS Collaboration unit had released more than 300 terabytes (TB) of high-quality open data. This includes over 100 TB, or 2.5 inverse femtobarns (fb−1), of data from proton collisions at 7 TeV, making up half the data collected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by the […]

Belgian government relaunches open data portal

Fedict – the Belgian Federal Public Service for Information and Communication Technology – and the office of Theo Francken, the Secretary of State for Administrative Simplification relaunched the federal open data portal – http://data.gov.be/ – last Tuesday, Belgian news site Datanews reports. Fedict launched the first version of the open data portal in Belgium in […]

Taiwan replaces UK at top of open data league table

According to information released by the Open Knowledge Foundation, Taiwan has surprisingly topped the Open Data countries league for 2015, displacing the United Kingdom which has dropped to 2nd place. The Top 10 open data countries are shown below. Taiwan’s ascent and replacement of the UK in the top position is down to a number […]

Bristol Data Dome launches next week

The Bristol Data Dome, which is housed inside At-Bristol‘s Planetarium, will be launched on Wednesday 18th November as part of the Festival of the Future City, the University of Bristol announces. Connected to a dedicated high-performance computer at the University of Bristol, the Data Dome is a pioneering development on Bristol’s digital scene with the […]

Open data in Bristol goes 3D

Bristol City Council is not unknown for its commitment to open data. So far it has been building up open data resources in 2 distinct locations: its dedicated open data site and profiles – its data and maps resource about Bristol and its neighbourhoods. We have now received news from BCC’s Kevin O’Malley that At-Bristol, […]

France: one-third of local authorities embrace open data

According to a study carried out by Markess International, the majority of local authorities should have initiated an open data process between now and 2017, French IT news site Le Monde Informatique reports. This type of project forms a springboard for digital transformation. While local government reform is is redrawing the local authority map, digital […]

Dutch public sector to adopt ODF as standard?

The Dutch Standardisation Board would like to see the mandatory use of Open Document Format (ODF) for the country’s public sector organisations, according to a report on Joinup giving details of a presentation made by Nico Westpalm van Hoorn to the recent ODF Plugfest held in The Hague. Van Hoorn stated that over 450,000 documents […]

Bulgaria releases first open data sets

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that Bulgaria has just published the first datasets on its open data portal. Some 36 datasets from 26 public sector organisations have now been made available online. Furthermore, the Bulgarian Council of Ministers has also established a dedicated team to overcome public sector resistance to […]

Open Knowledge Foundation defines open

The Open Knowledge Foundation is doing marvellous work in the fields of open data and open content. The Foundation has just published version 2 of its Open Definition. This definition is released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence and is reproduced verbatim below (complete with US spellings and punctuation throughout. Ed.). Open Definition Version 2.0 […]

Companies House takes open data route

Yesterday, while David Cameron was rearranging his Cabinet, one significant piece of news (apart from the DRIP Bill. Ed.) seems to have escaped the personality-obsessed British media. The news was the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills announced that Companies House is to make all of its digital data available free of charge. It has […]

Bristol open data initiative launched

Bristol City Council is working with the Future Cities Catapult and the Connected Digital Economy Catapult on a new open data initiative that will help Bristolians improve their city with the help of local authority data. The partners are working together to release Bristol civic data sets such as traffic management and land use databases […]

EP Digital Rights hustings, Bristol: a view from the chair

On Friday evening the Open Rights Group organised one of a series of nationwide European Digital Rights hustings at St Werburgh’s Community Centre in Bristol. This was a chance for local people to quiz MEP candidates from the South West about their views on digital rights and ask them to sign up to the 10 […]