Matt Biddulph: Open Data Movement - The Next Wave of Open Source

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 17:14:10 +0000

Aula Talk, recorded on August 17th at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology. Hosted and arranged by Ulla-Maaria Mutanen. * * *The Wikipedia is only the tip of the iceberg of information that is becoming freely accessible on the internet. Following the success of open source, an open data movement is occurring online that seeks to gather, publish and enable the reuse of rich machine-readable datasets - like all programs ever broadcasted by the BBC.By opening up these wellsprings of information, which were previously only accessible to large institutions, the open data movement has unleashed a new wave of creativity on the Web and more recently in online 3D environments, notably Second Life. Programmers, students, and companies are building mashups by overlaying photos, blog posts, and other objects to data provided by companies like Google, Yahoo and Amazon, and importantly also open datasets like the BBC Programme Catalogue, Wikipedia, Open Streetmap, and Thinglink.As a case in point, Biddulph describes how the BBC's database of programming from the 1920s to the present day was transformed from an internal green-screen application to a public Web 2.0 service using Ruby on Rails. Biddulph also shows playful examples of what you can do with open datasets.* * *Matt Biddulph is a freelance software developer based in London. He previously worked at BBC Radio and Music Interactive as the leader of the software architecture team, aka Head of Plugging Things Into Other Things. He blogs on Hack Diary.* * *Aula Talks is an ongoing series of videotaped lectures by people who've got something interesting to say about creativity, society, and technology. Past speakers include David Weinberger, Lawrence Lessig, Joichi Ito, and others. The events are open to Aula members and anyone who is interested, free of charge. For information about upcoming talks, see the Aula blog.

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Matt Biddulph: Open Data Movement - The Next Wave of Open Source