The LinkedUp Veni Competition has now opened, and is inviting submissions.
The first of three consecutive competitions, the Veni Competition is calling for you to submit an innovative and robust prototype or demo that uses linked and/or open data for educational purposes.
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., has launched a trial of Altmetric, a service that tracks and measures the impact of scholarly articles and datasets on both traditional and social media. The six month trial will run on a number of subscription and open access journals published by Wiley including Advanced Materials, Angewandte Chemie, BJU International, Brain and Behavior, Methods in Ecology and Evolution and EMBO Molecular Medicine.
As part of the trial Altmetric will track social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, blogs, newspapers, magazines and online reference managers like Mendeley and CiteULike for mentions of scholarly articles published in the journals included in the trial. Altmetric will create and display a score for each article measuring the quality and quantity of attention that the particular article has received. The Altmetric score is based on three main factors: the number of individuals mentioning a paper, where the mentions occurred and how often the author of each mention talks about the article.
Today, we are excited to announce that our work with the US Federal Government (data.gov) has gone live at catalog.data.gov! You can also read the announcement from the data.gov blog with their description of the new catalog.
The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Services team, which deploys CKAN, have been working hard on a new unified catalog to replace the numerous previously existing catalogs of data.gov. All geospatial and raw data is federated into a single portal where data from different portals, sources and catalogs is displayed in a beautiful standardized user interface allowing users to search, filter and facet through thousands of datasets.
This is a key part of the U.S. meeting their newly announced Open Data Policy and marks data.gov’s first major step into open source. All the code is available on Github and data.gov plan to make their CKAN / Drupal set-up reusable for others as part of OGPL.
The public relations hook of the administration’s open data push ties into its economic potential. Todd Park, the federal chief technology officer and one of the most enthusiastic evangelists for open data, claims that unlocking the global positioning system for commercial use helped generate $100 billion in economic value. At a recent conference, he told a luncheon audience that the government is “sitting on a treasure trove of economic opportunity with the data we hold.”
It’s been exactly one year since the release of the Digital Government Strategy that included open data provisions, and four years since the launch of the Data.gov portal run by the General Services Administration. Data.gov started with 47 datasets, and now there are about 400,000.
Highlights
Government for the people by the people calls for crowdsourcing.Build a large network of partners in academia and the private sector.Reuse of data sets creates apps that benefit everyone.Data is a valuable national resource and a strategic asset to the U.S. Government, its partners, and the public. Managing this data as an asset and making it available, discoverable, and usable – in a word, open– not only strengthens our democracy and promotes efficiency and effectiveness in government, but also has the potential to create economic opportunity and improve citizens’ quality of life.
For example, when the U.S. Government released weather and GPS data to the public, it fueled an industry that today is valued at tens of billions of dollars per year. Now, weather and mapping tools are ubiquitous and help everyday Americans navigate their lives.
The ultimate value of data can often not be predicted. That’s why the U.S. Government released a policy that instructs agencies to manage their data, and information more generally, as an asset from the start and, wherever possible, release it to the public in a way that makes it open, discoverable, and usable.
The White House developed Project Open Data – this collection of code, tools, and case studies – to help agencies adopt the Open Data Policy and unlock the potential of government data. Project Open Data will evolve over time as a community resource to facilitate broader adoption of open data practices in government. Anyone – government employees, contractors, developers, the general public – can view and contribute. So dive right in and help to build a better world through the power of open data.
Each day, the Charts of Note series from the Economic Research Service (ERS) delivers an innovative, visual display of research findings. Wouldn’t it be great if these charts could be easily grabbed for use on your own website or blog? Well, now they can.
The new Federal Open Data Policy asks agencies to use machine-readable formats when they build and disseminate information. At ERS, we are already traveling down that track…for Charts of Note and more. Our goal is to improve the reach, accessibility, and utility of important research findings.
Driven by member and author feedback, technical professional association IEEE has announced that all of its peer-reviewed journals — more than 100 — now offer open-access publishing options.
The growth of open-access scholarly research publishing enables technologists and the general public to read articles online for free, as opposed to the traditional model of paying for a subscription. Removing access barriers can advance research and scientific applications by exposing new concepts to a broader audience. Studies have shown that this approach may increase article citations.
As of June 2012, more than 7600 open-access journals were being published in 117 countries, according to a report from the UK-based Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings.
