Open data
How Microsoft Uses Open Against Open
To my shame, Peter Murray-Rust put up a reply to my post below in just a few hours, where it had taken me days to answer his original posting. So with this reply to his reply, I'm trying to do better.
Peter includes this disclaimer:
Before diving in I should get a potential conflict of interest out of the way. We are about to receive funding from Microsoft (for the OREChem project (see post on Chemistry Repositories). This does not buy an artificial silence on commenting on Microsoft’s practice, any more than if I accept a grant from JISC or EPSRC I will refrain from speaking my mind. Nor do I have to love their products. I currently hate Vista. However I need an MS OS on my machine because it makes it easier to use tools such as LiveMeeting (a system for sharing desktops). I’ve used LiveMeeting once and I liked it. OK, Joe did the driving because he knows his way round better than me, but I can learn it. Not everything MS does is bad and not everything it does is good.
OOXML? For Pete's Sake, No
Peter Murray-Rust is one of the key figures in the world of open data and open science, and deserves a lot of the credit for making these issues more visible. Here's an interesting post in which he points out that PDF files are not ideal from an archiving viewpoint:
I should make it clear that I am not religiously opposed to PDF, just to the present incarnation of PDF and the mindset that it engenders in publishers, repositarians, and readers. (Authors generally do not use PDF).
He then discusses in detail what the problems are and what solutions might be. Then he drops this clanger:
I’m not asking for XML. I’m asking for either XHTML or Word (or OOXML)
Word? OOXML??? Come on, Peter, you want open formats and you're willing to accept one of the most botched "standards" around, knocked up for purely political reasons, that includes gobs of proprietary elements and is probably impossible for anyone other than Microsoft to implement? *That's* open? I don't think so....
Speaking - State of the Map 12-13 July
Just a quick note to say that I’ll be speaking on open data, law, and licensing at State of the Map on 12-13 July in Limerick, Ireland. State of the Map is the annual conference for Open Street Map.
Information Governance Conference 2008
The Society for Computers and the Law (SCL) is having a conference on 1 May on information governance:
Information Governance Conference 2008
Information governance has rapidly become an integral part of organisational strategy in both the public and private sector. Organisations of all types and size are generating ever greater volumes of sensitive data and that data must be handled lawfully to avoid damaged reputations and unnecessary costs. Breaches of the law can result in enforcement notices, fines and even criminal convictions for directors and managers.
The SCL Information Governance Conference tackles this fastmoving subject to provide authoritative, practical advice for advisers and their clients. The panel of expert speakers will give an insider’s view of the challenges facing organisations and distil that collective experience into practical know how on information governance.
Of particular interest to readers (and myself) is a session on Creative Commons concepts and personal data:
Happy Birthday, Open Data
The received wisdom is that open source begat open access, which begat open data, and in broad outline that's true enough. But in one respect it's quite wrong: the first, and arguably most important open data store was set up fully 25 years ago, and is still going from strength to strength:
For a quarter century, GenBank has helped advance scientific discovery worldwide. The nucleic acid sequence database was established by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1982. Since its creation, the GenBank database has grown at an exponential rate. Amazing as it may seem, in 1984, the entirety of GenBank’s data was published in a two volume hardcover book. Today, if the current contents of GenBank’s database were printed, it would fill more than 300 pickup trucks with paper.
Unveiled at the onset of the “Information Age”, GenBank has continued to evolve and incorporate technological innovations. The GenBank database has remained on the cutting edge of technology and illustrates the dynamic changes over the past 25 years in quantity and speed with which information is shared.
PDDL released
Just to highlight for opencontentlawyer.com readers, that we released the final version of the Public Domain Dedication and Licence over at Open Data Commons this past weekend. I will post more about the process and the final result when I return to full posting strength in April.
