Toluu : Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog

Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog

You may have heard that lcsh.info - which explored how Library of Congress Subject Headings could be represented as a Semantic Web application - was closed down last month.

The good news is that there are now two new projects publishing library-related open data:

The first, ICONCLASS, is “an experimental service that makes the ICONCLASS Iconographic Classification system available as linked-data using the SKOS vocabulary”.

The second, from the University of Huddersfield Library, publishes circulation and recommendation data under both CC0 and the PDDL. Dave Pattern writes:

In total, there’s data for over 80,000 titles derived from a pool of just under 3 million circulation transactions spanning a 13 year period.

Data is comprised of two parts:

Circulation Data. This breaks down the loans by year, by academic school, and by individual academic courses. This data will primarily be of interest to other academ

5th COMMUNIA Workshop: Accessing, Using and Reusing Public Sector Content and Data, London, 26-27th March 2009December 19 2008

We are pleased to announce that the 5th COMMUNIA Workshop, “Accessing, Using and Reusing Public Sector Content and Data” will take place in London in March 2009. Details are as follows:

When: 26-27th March 2009
Where: New Academic Building, London School of Economics, London UK

From the blurb:

Across the world there is a growing recognition of the social and commercial value of public sector content and data: be that the text of laws, the holdings of public museums, or the geospatial and environmental information collected by government agencies. Moreover, it is likely that better access to and use of such information is central to improving governance and increasing democratic participation.

The 5th COMMUNIA workshop, co-organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation and London School of Economics, will focus on how we can unlock the huge potential of public sector material. It was also examine the current obstacles to doing this — legal, technological and social — as well as how they can be overcome. In particular, much of the value of public sector material can only be realized if it is reused and interlinked — both activities that are currently difficult for a variety of legal and technological reasons.

The workshop will bring together researchers, policy-makers, stakeholders and representatives from across Europe for presentations and discu

Open Milton launched for Milton’s 400th birthday!December 9 2008

The 9th of December 2008 is John Milton’s 400th birthday. To celebrate this life-long advocate of liberty we’ve officially launched ‘Open Milton’ – an open set of Milton’s works, together with ancillary information and tools, in a form designed for reuse:

http://www.openmilton.org/

The Open Milton project has two main objectives:

Provide the works of John Milton, along with textual apparatus and tools all in an open form.
Deliver this material as a knowledge package that allows for easy deployment, redistribution and reuse.

Specifically we provide a full open set of Milton’s works along with ancillary material, a variety of tools and a python API. In addition to the works themselves there is a chronology, statistics, a concordance and search facilities.

All material is open so that anyone can use, redistribute and reuse these materials freely. From new printed editions of Milton’s works (any budding illustrators out there?) to new kinds of electronic resources for resea

Musopen - free public domain music!December 8 2008

Musopen is a charity that aims to produce and distribute recordings and sheet music of public domain music.

Musopen is an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music. We want to give the world access to music without the legal hassles so common today. There is a great deal of music that has expired copyrights, but almost no recordings of this music is in the public domain. We aim to record or obtain recordings that have no copyrights so that our visitors may listen, re-use, or in any way enjoy music. Put simply, our mission is to set music free.

They’ve currently got material from 29 composers - from Bach to Brahms, Mozart to Mussorgsky. An interesting feature of the project is it allows users to suggest pieces that they would like to have recorded - and to pledge funds to have the recording made. The bid page lists 14 bids with over $1100 pledged.

The recordings produced are dedicated to the public domain and hence can be freely re-used and re-distributed for any purpose - from being shipped with educational projects to being remixed or sampled in new tracks. They use

Biblios - “world’s largest database” of open bibliographic data goes beta!December 2 2008

Biblios.net, “the world’s largest database of freely-licensed library records”, is now beta-testing. From their website:

‡biblios.net is a subscription-based, hosted version of the open-source ‡biblios metadata editor that we released earlier this year. In addition to the editor, ‡biblios.net includes some extended community features such as integrated real-time chat, forums, and private messaging.

‡biblios.net also provides access to the world’s largest database of freely-licensed library records. The database will be freely available to ‡biblios.net subscribers and non-subscribers alike via Z39.50, OAI, and direct download.

Furthermore, the database itself will be maintained by ‡biblios.net users similar to the way that Wikipedia’s database is maintained by users.

We’re now looking for enthusiastic participants to help shape the final production release of ‡biblios.net.

How open will the database be? They state:

Through the ‡biblios.net network, you can share your record creations with the rest of the ‡biblios.net community, under the terms of the Open Data Commons, which ensures that anyone may freely use, modify and share your records.

We’re glad they are using Open Data Commons project (presumably the PDDL) which is developed by