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 Of course, I'll mostly talk about things I've discovered recently, some of this might be out of date, etc.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!