Danny Ayers who ran the developers track at WWW2007 recorded our Open Data session. Some presentations had slides and especially Steve Coast and I used animated/interactive material but I think the ideas come across. The Q&A had a lot of audience participation (which we all encouraged) but not all speakers were close to micophones – but hey, it’s the first time!
Danny Ayers: Open Data Podcasts
The Dev Track at WWW2007 began with a group of presentations on Open Data, chaired by Paul Miller of Talis. I did a rough & ready recording, which I’ve trimmed and chunked. Quality varies quite a bit (Q&A particularly), and some slides were shown, but I believe there’s plenty in the audio to make sense of the material.
- Peter Murray-Rust (Cambridge University) on the politics of data for scientists : mp3 , 8mins
- Steve Coast (OpenStreetMap) on the OpenStreetMap project : mp3 , 5:30mins
- Rob Styles (Talis) on licensing data : mp3 , 9mins
- Jamie Taylor (Metaweb) on the value of data and business models : mp3 , 8:30mins
- Q&A, discussion – details of the above explored : mp3 , 50mins
Personally I was particularly pleased by this session because it revealed information that I for one would never have searched out without prompting. Turned out to be very interesting. “When you start using data, you need to start paying attention to these things…”
In retrospect the session was perhaps slightly mis-billed having “Semantic Web” in the title, when the material was about data in general. But the room was full and the audience engaged, so no harm done. In fact I think RDF was only mentioned once – see if you can spot it…
Q: “Where do we go from here?”
A: “Evangelize!”
Many thanks to everyone involved.
I was particular pleased to see the wide engagement – this is dev-track which is not about politics – but it was clear that access to data really matters to a lot of people. There is obviously the need for licenses – Talis have been working on one, for example.
Thanks Danny