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.
