Open Knowledge Foundation Blog - Latest Comments

Re: re:publica roundup

Opendata.ch — Thu, 16 May 2013 08:51:09 -0000

Michael Kreil (OpenDataCity) coded this neat schedule with links to all the available youtube videos: http://michaelkreil.github.io/...

Re: We need open carbon emissions data now!

chaunedved — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:04:48 -0000

And there is http://cuongnt.webchuyennghiep... if you want to have the accessories for your laptop

Re: We need open carbon emissions data now!

DominikMoritz — Tue, 14 May 2013 05:48:50 -0000

And there is http://www.ipcc-data.org/ if you want to have the computer models.

Re: We need open carbon emissions data now!

Baruch — Mon, 13 May 2013 23:45:59 -0000

BioChar usage in agricultural fields is one solution to excess carbon dioxide.

Please see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...,
and the International BioChar Initiative at: http://www.biochar-internation...

Re: We need open carbon emissions data now!

Maya Forstater — Mon, 13 May 2013 17:13:32 -0000

I am not sure that more carbon data is what's needed. There is lots of carbon data and its not on the dashboard because its not priced, and/or we can't agree a set of national targets which reconcile equity and rapid emission reductions (the two problems are opposite sides of the same coin). More data, more timely or disagregated data isn't going to solve that.

Sometimes you get breakthroughs in thinking and communication with clever data presentation. Rockstrom and co's planetary boundaries had done that, as has the Carbon Bubble work on stranded assets. But even then these only function as data-driven metaphors, not yet as new bits of the dashboard of inflation, interest and unemployment numbers etc.. that you rightly say are what people and politicians really pay attention to.

I do agree that OECD should make their energy data open and stop charging for it (we've paid for it already).

But innovation in data analysis and presentation of carbon numbers surely has to start with a problem, not just with a conviction that more data will help keep up the pressure (it isn't working!)

A couple of areas where where I think some more open and beautiful data could be useful are:

1) The corporate carbon disclosures - we have 10 years of corporate carbon reporting. This needs to be made into open data. It would be useful to be able to make sense of corporate carbon reduction targets and performance in relation to their contribution to economic activity (see http://hiyamaya.wordpress.com/... ). This would allow us to start to make a link between the corporate carbon dashboards, and the global one and stop giving corporations 'marks for effort' in managing carbon emissions.

2) On the question of equity for sustainable development -This is an idea whose time seems to have come (http://hiyamaya.wordpress.com/... - and was being discussed with new urgency at the international climate talks in Bonn last month (http://tcktcktck.org/2013/05/j... - the talk is of “equity reference frameworks” which allow national emission reductions pledges to be judged against a meaningful yardstick of fairness and adequacy. There have been some very academic presentations of this, but none that yet have the accessibility of a Hans Rosling type presentation, with sliders and toggles and so on for different options.

3) The Center for Global Development has a really interesting proposal for how to finance emission reduction between countries in energy and forests, but with no financial numbers on it - http://international.cgdev.org... - I would love to see someone take this model and cost it

Before pushing for more data I would start by trying to identify the problems and opportunities.

My three questions are all about ways to combine data about emissions with information about money/value, time/ambition and equity/fairness. I am sure there are other ways of asking the same question (which may be smarter than mine). But ultimately a dashboard is going to have to combine these four dimensions in a way that helps to guide action and decision making.

Re: We need open carbon emissions data now!

Friedrich Lindenberg — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:17:05 -0000

what is wrong with http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/d... and http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ab... ?

Re: Who wants to build an open social bookmarking service?

السياحة في ماليزيا — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:23:17 -0000

http://egyptairbookingtickets....

Re: Announcing the Open Humanities Award Winners

Historic Graves — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:44:50 -0000

Both projects look fascinating -congrats!

Re: The White House Seeks Champions of Open Science

Marcos Satoru Kawanami — Wed, 08 May 2013 10:32:18 -0000

You are right.

Re: What Do We Mean By Small Data

Differance — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:12:51 -0000

It should be My Data, not Big Data or small Data. You want massively scalable data architectures as the default on end user machines, with facilities to add nodes/hardware to your endpoint. We are all Google.

Re: Forget Big Data, Small Data is the Real Revolution

Morten Skaaning — Tue, 07 May 2013 08:34:19 -0000

i forgot. One of the "poster childs" of big data would be Google Translate. Which tries to use so much data that grammar becomes a "soft problem".

Re: Forget Big Data, Small Data is the Real Revolution

Morten Skaaning — Tue, 07 May 2013 08:30:48 -0000

Hi,

I read your article and a few things stuck out as odd. The revolution talk is all nice, but you didn't explain why big data is unprofitable, nor how you would reach a consensus about data formats in a decentralized environment.

Small data have a tendency to fragment and loosing meaning as data formats permute. Why mention Excel as an example when it's produced by a company with a history of proprietary format lock-in? From your examples it seems like you encourage a movement of "keep track of your household expenses" and "know what you're doing", but those are not exactly revolutionary concepts.

You mention "componentization", but how do you make sure that components have any meaningful connection? What is a "data package"? Is it like an XML-file or a zip-file? How do you define the data exchange protocols if all data permutes faster than your consensus grows?

If all data is decentralized and sporadic, wouldn't there be big business opportunities in organizing the data and making it searchable? You know, like Google and The Web. What about selling redundancy for data that could go missing? Or selling a package of related data in a chuck, so you'd know that you have all the data you need for a specific purpose.

What you do you with the email addresses from the people that sign up at the bottom of your article? Do you make any kind of money from those?

Re: Forget Big Data, Small Data is the Real Revolution

Emanuil Tolev — Sun, 05 May 2013 13:08:02 -0000

Agreed. "small data" may be a harder problem to tackle than Big Data though, similar to how organisations learned to deal with writing and maintaining big software systems in-house, but when it came to distributing and reusing functionality, the problem becomes quite thorny (think Python's setuptools, pip; win32's DLL hell; Ruby's problems with multiple gem versions on 1 system).

Another problem which may arise with Big Data is the ability to co-operate - in the software industry, before the API age there wasn't really a way to maximise interoperability "out-of-the-box". And it's still difficult to get an API quite right.

It is, however, a worthwhile problem, certainly.

(Another related topic is that software and the software industry have really mostly been about data...)

I suppose small, modular, versatile tools might help in that they make the thinking / data handling process easier. Just like that philosophy helped the *nix family become so popular among people who had to deal with a lot of semistructured data (e.g. logs). Things like OKFN's Labs projects (great work to all involved btw!), or (for scholarship) OpenArticleGauge ( http://oag.cottagelabs.com ) and hopefully many more related tools to come...

Re: What Do We Mean By Small Data

AsherBond — Sun, 05 May 2013 05:36:53 -0000

Small data is still Big Data when it requires mass participation of thinkers independently working with smaller data sets. One major difference is in the freedom to independently abstract data without as much permission or access to large data sets. I think linked-open data is a nice way to hybridize big data (which is publicly available) with more independent data abstraction processes.

Re: Who wants to build an open social bookmarking service?

mohsen noura — Sat, 04 May 2013 09:24:02 -0000

http://ciak-multiservices.be4m...

تشاك المتخصصة في خدمات الامن والحراسة والنظافة والتأمين وهي رائدة شركات الحراسة والنظافة والخدمات الامنية

Re: Frictionless Data: making it radically easier to get stuff done with data

Rufus Pollock — Sat, 04 May 2013 07:29:17 -0000

@joost schouppe good comments. Could you point out the datasets you mean (and, even better, raise issues on them - see the "report issue" on each dataset page).

Re the country codes: would love to fix this - again please just raise an issue on the relevant dataset!

Re: Opening Public Data in South Africa

Joymae Asebmem — Fri, 03 May 2013 22:58:01 -0000

To view latest job posting in South Africa you check out this link.
http://www.joblife.co.za/jobs/...

Re: Open Knowledge: much more than open data

Opendata.ch — Fri, 03 May 2013 09:20:29 -0000

This image may or may not add to the discussion. http://epicgraphic.com/wp-cont... [Image courtesy of Epic Graphics, http://epicgraphic.com/data-ca...]

Re: Who wants to build an open social bookmarking service?

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Re: Forget Big Data, Small Data is the Real Revolution

Allen Bonde — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 08:51:18 -0000

Love the post/topic! The way I've been thinking about Small Data is as the 'last mile' of Big Data - we (often) need Big Data behind the scenes, but the trick is to provide simpler, more consumer-style apps and tools at the front end that work on any device, foster social sharing and help non-technical users turn insights into actions...that are actually helpful in the moment. Readers can see my latest thoughts here: http://www.digitalclaritygroup...

cheers,
Allen

Re: Welcoming Greece Local Group as Open Knowledge Foundation Chapter

Prakash Neupane — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 06:28:28 -0000

Congratulation OKFN Greece...... now you have greater responsibility best of luck

Re: What We Hope the Digital Public Library of America Will Become

Gwendolyn Stancell — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 01:16:42 -0000

LIFELONG DREAM, ABOUT TO BE, REALIZED!!!!!!!

Re: Forget Big Data, Small Data is the Real Revolution

miska knapek — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 07:23:17 -0000

Thanks for the post. Good points.

The latest edition of the Datastories podcast, run by some eminent information design people, partly touches on this issue. http://datastori.es/data-stori...

While the episode is about information design work for NGOs, they mention that working with big data assumes that one can find an answer to something in the data, but not really beginning with a question.

When starting out with a question, one needs to look at which "small data" ( and maybe the big data, depending on what one wants to find) could be relevant.

Hence, bragging about how "big" one's data is, is a bit like bragging about how many features one's phone has, rather than how useful it is.

Of course, all data has its place - and the democratic access to this is important, as Rufus mentioned - and it's a good question of whether to start with opening data, or thinking of good questions to ask, and then seeing which data one should open.

Perhaps one answer is to get as many domain-experts - and people in general - into the discussion, so they can come up with good questions leading to relevant data being opened.

Re: What Do We Mean By Small Data

seanrwcrawford — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:01:59 -0000

Great article, there's a lot to be said about pushing back against the tidal wave of big data talk, and getting people to see just how much can be accomplished with "small data". We're working on a data platform that's a part of the empowerment of small data through the democratization of it, and by providing easy access to datasets while providing it in a form that people can use with almost any software they're comfortable with. http://www.quandl.com/

I think as time goes on we'll really start to see some incredible uses of data that really make a difference in people's lives, and IMO parallel the 3D printing industry in terms of how much it can change the world.

Re: Frictionless Data: making it radically easier to get stuff done with data

joost schouppe — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:49:07 -0000

Wouldn't it be more frictionless if you seperate classification from item? E.g. providing a list of countries and their data, not a dataset containing both country and region. Or if you need to do so, at least add a variable indicating wether the data are for regions or countries. Also, in ten datasets, you use two different codes for countries. We need common standards for one concept, right? Or at least translation tables between codings.