Goodbye

This blog is now retired. New stuff will be posted here.

OpenData not-so-daily

Luckily I didn't write my goal of doing a blog post a day about OpenData in my last post, because it turns out, writing a blog post about it every day would cost a lot of time. Nevertheless, I bring you yet another post. This one's packed with a bunch of news, applications and new(ish) data. Enjoy, and feel free to post feedback in the comments or through twitter, @namnatulco.

News

Although we commonly define open data specifically as not being tied to individual people, privacy issues are starting to appear around open data. This guardian article provides an overview of some recent privacy problems in this context. The OKFN has a working group on this topic, as well as a somewhat older but excellent blog post on the topic.

In the Netherlands, an interesting new hackathon has shown up: the Flora & Fauna (Dutch) hack. Now, that by itself is already quite interesting --environment and ecology seem to be the main topic--, but the cool thing is, they actually have a list of concrete challenges to solve! Unfortunately the entire thing is currently in Dutch. However, they seem to be worth checking out!

The Sunlight Foundation, a US-oriented organization that promotes open data and government transparency, writes a nice discussion about what open data gives us beyond business opportunities. From my fairly limited perspective, in the US, stimulating business is increasingly tied into the motivation for opening up data. Although I'm all for business use cases, this Sunlight article demonstrates that shouldn't be the only reason.

Applications

This article (in Dutch) is a nice introduction about what OSCity (in English) does: it allows for spatial searching and spatial organization. The latter has always been a big topic in Dutch society, it being comparatively densely populated. Continuing that trend, OSCity allows you to search in data; when the application loads, an example search like "offices near water" or "addressen with age < 30" appears. Try it out! OSCity claims they want to include European data in the future, so stay I suppose we'll stay tuned. Unfortunately there isn't anything regarding data source, but I've asked them to find out more.

I encountered this list of applications for Swiss open data. The list mostly lists some older visualizations from the last few months. The most recent one is this application (German), which computes various statistics based on population density, and below it has a map that shows the density of the different municipalities (German 'Gemeinden'). Further down in the article there's some more graphs that show the same data for easy comparison. The cited data source is here.

In this tumblr article from a little while back, there is a really cool visualization of the orientations of streets (direct link to image). Notice in particular how many examples here have a very strange, rectangular pattern.

The interactive application on this page, by a German newspaper, shows how aircraft deviate from the official routes surrounding Berlin, resulting in significant noise complaints from the surrounding population.

This map (German) by a large German newspaper shows the amount of doctors relative to income and population in four major German cities. The map is based on address data of different types of doctors.

Data

In Ottawa, Canada, someone created this spreadsheet that provides a nice overview of the available data in their region. Looks like an approach we here in Ulm could re-use -- manual tables like on this page aren't always helpful.

In the UK, the environmental agency of the government announced that they would make a number of different water- and flood-related data sets permanently available to the public (presumably including new data). A little more background can be found in this guardian article, which says in February some data sets were already released for a short time.

I'm back!

Maybe? I'm not sure yet. It's been a long time since I've felt I had something worth writing about, but for the past few months I've been interacting with the UlmAPI group. We're one of the newly launched (well, more like newly united, UlmAPI has been around for many years) OK Labs, loosely organized by the  German branch of the Open Knowledge Foundation. As you might have gathered by now, the group is based in Ulm. It currently mostly consists of computer scientists from the university, although one of our goals is to involve more non-computer science and non-students into the group. Having been assigned "scribe", it feels appropriate for me to start blogging again. Another motivation is that a recent project that involves documenting highlights of OpenData felt rather cold and lacking context, but adding context to all of the links could mess up the orderly list. Instead I'll write some context here on this blog, and minimize the text in the wiki. Of course, I'll mostly talk about things I've discovered recently, some of this might be out of date, etc.

News
CloudMade announced, quite some time ago already, that they'll stop providing map services to free users. I felt this was worth repeating because it puts a lot of applications by OpenData groups at risk, including ours. Yesterday our group spent a lot of time setting up a tile server to replace it. The tile server isn't up yet --turns out importing Germany takes a long time--, but for all of you out there having problems with it, make sure LANGUAGE and LC_ALL are correctly set. Normally the fall-back should ensure nothing breaks, but several scripts actually fail when this is not as expected.

Here is a great post suggesting we should have more Europe in OpenData. It basically speaks for itself -- with the upcoming elections, who knows, something might just happen.

Applications
I'm not sure how old it is, but the OpenGov Foundation introduced .gov.ify, an application that pokes fun at the wonderful qualities of government-produced PDF files. Be sure to watch the accompanying youtube video.

A really cool map of Barcelona can be found here, visualizing a large amount of data that indexes the age of buildings in the city. I seem to recall something similar for historic images in Ulm, but I can't find it any more.

Data
I'm fairly sure this isn't new, but this page on the German wikimedia provides an index of information that can be used freely. It talks about many types of data; not just the typical metadata we would see in OpenData projects, but also music and historical objects.


And that's the end of today's blog. I hope you enjoyed reading it!