Warsaw and the ODGcamp CKAN presentation

The CKAN team had a fantastic time at the Open Government Data Camp. This year it was held in Warsaw in what appears to be an old set of factory buildings turned into a nightclub. Amidst the funky decaying buildings and graffiti there were a large group of people who are really passionate about open data. We had a full day workshop before the conference with lots of demos of what people are working on, including ones by Tariq (see picture right), the open data evangelist at the World Bank, Katlin from the Sunlight Foundation, Paul from the Open Data Netherlands portal (based on CKAN), Ton from Epsiplatform and of course the CKAN team. David Read introduced us to the notions behind open data with his presentation, James talked about our technical accomplishments and I walked through some of our existing and upcoming features. We had another great workshop during the conference itself which involved a number of demos on making open data itself accessible and queriable. To follow up on this, we're having an open skype meet up next week to talk about where we are all at with this and come up with ways we can consolidate and work together. To join in, please sign up here. To get an idea of some of the things we've been showing off and of course of our new webstore, here is James' CKAN presentation from the Open Government Data Camp: All in all, it was fantastic opportunity to meet many interesting and brilliant people in the field of open data. Look forward to working together with some new faces and old ones that I've finally had a chance to meet. Please feel free to get in touch if there's anything we can help with. Irina Bolychevsky CKAN Product and Community Lead

Updates from the rest of the team!

David was involved in meetings with various government representatives who are looking to opening up CKAN data portals. The 'open data message' has got through to nearly most North American and European governments now, and it's exciting to see progress this year from Brazil, Kenya etc. Lots of European CKAN partners are going beyond the basic data catalogue and investigating feature-rich data stores such as OKF's WebStore. We're looking at merging in features from similar open source projects from Max Ogden and Rotterdam Open Data. David Eaves' keynote struck a chord, challenging us ensure governments build more infrastructure on top of their data portals, to keep them relevant. Another key challenge was building common formats for data around the world - public transportation schedules have been revolutionised by Google pushing GTFS, so lets unify data from public toilet locations to public spending around the world. (link: http://eaves.ca/2011/10/21/the-state-of-open-data-2011/ )

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Jilly was involved in the linked data workshop and related meetings. There was much enthusiasm for open and linked data tools and what they could offer the world. The summary of speakers can be found http://lod2.eu/BlogPost/700-700.html. This workshop gave a good over view of what is going on in Europe and the US. One of the most relevant areas was that of the difference in policy and attitude to open and linked data between different nations and between the EU and US. There appear to be more funds available over the next few years in the EU than in the US for open and linked data work. Another area of inspiration were the possibilities, that the different linked data tools, currently under development can offer. Spatial representation of data and use of android apps seemed to be very popular routes to go. The possibility of generating linked data cheaply and easily producing significant business value was also raised. I felt inspired by the workshop and enjoyed it immensely.