Planet Open Data News

Wanted: volunteers to join a team of “Data Curators” maintaining “core” datasets (like GDP or ISO-codes) in high-quality, easy-to-use and open form.

• What is the project about: Collecting and maintaining important and commonly-used (“core”) datasets in high-quality, standardized and easy-to-use form - in particular, as up-to-date, well-structured Data Packages.
  The “Core Datasets” effort is part of the broader Frictionless Data initiative.
• What would you be doing: identifying and locating core (public) datasets, cleaning and standardizing the data and making sure the results are kept up to date and easy to use
• Who can participate: anyone can contribute. Details on the skills needed are below.
• Get involved: read more below or jump straig

Have you noticed faster tiles lately? Browsing the map on openstreetmap.org should now be even more responsive. Three new servers, started providing tiles over the last 2 weeks, joining a server which started earlier in the year. Tile server saphira, located in London UK kindly hosted by Jump Networks. Tile server viserion, located in Pula […]

The Latin America OpenStreetMap community was created recently and we decided to organize collective projects on subjects that are common to many countries of our continent. Our first project is Mapazonia. The Amazon rainforest includes territory belonging to nine different nations and there are a lot of environmental institutions and governments that need better geospatial […]

Happy Christmas from OpenStreetMap to all of our contributors. This sentence doesn’t actually make sense when I think about it. It’s a familiar kind of sentence you might see on a company website, but OpenStreetMap is a project. A collaboration. A map, a database and a community. It’s not a company. I sometimes describe it […]

This is a joint blog post by Open Knowledge CEO Laura James and Open Knowledge Founder and President Rufus Pollock. In September we announced that Laura James, our CEO, is moving on from Open Knowledge and we are hiring a new Executive Director. From Rufus: I want to express my deep appreciation for everything that […]

JOSM developers have been running a logo design contest these past few months, and a few days ago they announced a winner. Here’s the brand new logo for JOSM: Congratulations to Diamond00744 on a great design! What is JOSM? JOSM is the “Java OpenStreetMap Editor”. It’s one of several software options you can choose to […]

We are happy to announce version v1.92 of schema.org. With this update we "soft launch" a substantial collection of improvements that will form the basis for a schema.org version 2.0 release in early 2015. There remain a number of site-wide improvements, bugfixes and clarifications that we'd like to make before we feel ready to use the name "v2.0". However the core vocabulary improvements are stable and available for use from today. As usual see the release notes page for details.

Please get in touch via the W3C Web Schemas group or our Github issue tracker if you'd like to share feedback with us and the wider schema.org community. We won't go into the details of each update in today's blog post, but there are a lot of additions and fixes, and more coming in 2015. Many than

One of the best opportunities that being part of a community offers is the chance to collaborate and make things happen together – and when we want this to happen in sync, what’s better than convening an (in person or online) event? Just before the end of the year, let’s collect a few highlights from […]

The Global Open Data Index 2014 team is thrilled to announce that the Global Open Data Index 2014 is now live! We would not have arrived here without the incredible support from our network and the wider open knowledge community in making sure that so many countries/places are represented in the Index and that the […]

Open education data is a relatively new area of interest with only dispersed pockets of exploration having taken place worldwide. The phrase ‘open education data’ remains loosely defined but might be used to refer to: all openly available data that could be used for educational purpose open data that is released by education institutions Understood […]

A couple of weeks ago we mentioned a brand new feature on the OpenStreetMap.org homepage. On the right hand side we have a new “?” button which lets you query the map. On openstreetmap.org, zoom in somewhere Click the “?” button to enter query mode Click the map on something you are interested in Hover […]

This is a cross-post by Ivonne Jansen-Dings, originally published on the Apps4Europe blog, see the original here. With 10 Business Lounges happening throughout Europe this year, Apps for Europe is trying to find the best open data applications and startups that Europe has to offer. We invite all developers, startups and companies that use open […]

Samuel Moore, Rosie Graves and Peter Kraker are the 2013-2014 Open Knowledge Panton Fellows – tasked with experimenting, exploring and promoting open practises through their research over the last twelve months. They just posted their final reports so we’d like to heartily congratulate them on an excellent job and summarise their highlights for the Open […]

Open Knowledge and Code for Africa launch pilot Open Government Fellowship Programme. Apply to become a fellow today. This blog announcement is available in French here and Portuguese here. Do you want to help us build African governments and societies that are more accountable and responsive to citizens? We are looking for the best ideas […]

We’ve just merged a new template for CKAN extensions. Whenever you create a new CKAN extension using the paster --plugin=ckan create -t ckanext ... command (as documented in the writing extensions tutorial) it’ll now use the new template, which gives you: PyPI integration – setup.py and MANIFEST.in files are automatically generated for your extension, ready […]

Open Knowledge project The Public Domain Review is very proud to announce the launch of it's very first book: a selection of weird and wonderful essays from the project's first three years.

Every two years the International Budget Partnership (IBP) runs a survey, called the Open Budget Survey, to evaluate formal oversight of budgets, how transparent governments are about their budgets and if there are opportunities to participate in the budget process. To easily measure and compare transparency among the countries surveyed, IBP created the Open Budget […]

This is a guest post, originally published in French on the Open Knowledge Foundation France blog Nowadays, being able to place an address on a map is an essential information. In France, where addresses were still unavailable for reuse, the OpenStreetMap community decided to create its own National Address Database available as open data. The […]

Last week the OpenStreetMap community came together for their annual conference “State Of The Map” We need to say a huge thank you to all the people involved in organising this year’s conference, including Henk Hoff, Gonzalo Gabriel Perez, Fernando Sanz, and Nicolás Alvarez. They battled various problems, and came out with a triumphant success! […]

ckanapi-exporter is a new API script that we’ve developed for exporting dataset metadata from CKAN to Excel-compatible CSV files. Check out the short presentation below, and visit ckanapi-exporter for more details:

I went to Paris this week to give a talk at SemWeb.Pro, an event that, like SemTechBiz in Silicon Valley or SEMANTiCS in Germany/Austria, is firmly established in the annual calendar. These are events where businesses and other ‘real world’ … Continue reading →

We are happy to announce the new CKAN Extensions Registry which lists available CKAN Extensions: extensions.ckan.org/ CKAN Extensions are a way to extend and alter the functionality of the base CKAN platform using the numerous extension points provided by CKAN. CKAN Extensions provide limitless possibilities from altering the site look and feel to adding site […]

Community and communication are key to the success of OpenStreetMap project, yet discussions about individual edits have always been clumsy and awkward. In this post, I’ll describe Changeset Discussions, a new feature of the OSM website which allows people to have public discussions around changesets. Before Changeset Discussions Before the introduction of Changeset Discussions, the only […]

deadoralive is a new broken-link checker service that works with CKAN and other sites, and ckanext-deadoralive is a CKAN plugin that you can install to integrate your CKAN site with the link checker. The pair have been developed by Open Knowledge as part of our work on the new version of Öppnadata, the Swedish national […]