Monthly Archives: July 2008

The Guardian takes two on piracy

The Guardian have a couple of articles which have a relevance to the notion of creative openness. Cory Doctorow extends the copyleft argument to the recent agreement between ISPs and the BPI whilst Keith Stuart explores how the games industry have dealt with piracy. Cory Doctorow‘s article uses the recent agreement between the ISPs and […]

Storing chat and SMS – is it possible?

A thought. Given the amount of IM and chat clients, how do we store any knowledge across that is being transferred? Is it be lost or can you “dump” the logs for later use? A similar thing must be happening with SMS. I would have thought that the providers store these but can we get […]

Storing data from blogs and wikis

Insitutional repositories already exist to store abstracts and documents. I was wondering if any of these have a way of storing blog posts or wiki pages and identifying their states; i.e. if a user was looking at a wiki page, they could see and archive edits to find its history. Whilst wikis do this as […]

Open Web Foundation to be announced

Chris Saad has announced that the Open Web Foundation is being set up to aid in the governance of data portability technologies on his blog. The Data Portability group has done a sterling job in evangelising and ensuring that their ideas are on the roadmap. The data silos are gradually being brought together (though I […]

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Bobbie Johnson has interviewed Tim Berners-Lee for the Guardian about the new subject of web science – study of how the Web works and the way it works. Both MIT and the University of Southampton are championing the Web Science Research Initiative. As the article says, the Web needs to remain free and open if […]

UK government asks “Showusabetterway.co.uk”

The Guardian reports that its Free Our Data campaign took another step closer to its goal today. Tom Watson, currently the Cabinet Office minister, is one of the forces behind a competition with the first prize of £20,000 for the best use of non-personal public data available through Showusabetterway.

Open Service Definition

The Open Knowledge Foundation are bringing the Open Service Definition to version 1.0 which is a helpful step. I wholeheartedly agree with it. As services and APIs develop, we need to create a legal framework within which data, knowledge and dissemination services can be used to allow greater access to open knowledge now rather than […]

Getting vertigo retrieving information

Last week I went along to the ISKO UK seminar/event on Information Retrieval (IR) held at University College London. Brian Vickery gave a talk about the first fifty years or so of IR. Like any good event, I came away with loads to ponder. I’m still pondering some of my notes (I wish my handwriting […]

The Future of Knowledge?

I went to the Future of the Internet talk at the Oxford Internet Institute (webcast here) where Larry Sanger (Citizendium and Wikipedia) and Andrew Keen debated the where the Internet might go and how knowledge would develop. Neither,  I think, really got into the argument but rather skirted the issues. Sanger’s argument for a more […]

Building data stores

Mats Dahlstrom’s talk at the Dilemmas of Digitization conference mentioned the Deep Sharing: A Case for the Federated Digital library paper by Daivd Seaman. It would be great if there was a system for rapidly building small data stores from scratch to include texts and then have these with editing software components, text encoding output […]