The notion of allowing access to your website content and data via API's and other machine readable means is well embedded in geek circles.
This presentation aims to look at the non-technical reasons why these approaches are a good idea, arguing that it is time for Machine Readable Data (MRD) approaches to be better communicated to content owners, budget holders and other non-technical stakeholders.
E-Government ist gut für Staat und Bürger - aber nur dann, wenn die Behörden die von ihnen gesammelten Daten auch wieder herausrücken. In den USA bemühen sich zahlreiche Initiativen auch seitens der Regierung um mehr Offenheit. In Europa arbeitet auch WWW-Erfinder Tim Berners-Lee daran mit, die Datenschätze der Behörden zugänglich zu machen.
ISWC2009 Tutorial on Legal and Social Frameworks for Sharing Data on the Web http://www.opendatacommons.org/events/iswc-2009-legal-social-sharing-data-web/
We believe that dedicating data to the public domain is the best way to ensure that data is universally reusable and remixable. When data is public domain it means that it can be reused automatically without needing to check terms and conditions or track the source of every statement to provide attribution. These kinds of things act as friction to reuse, wasting energy that could be better spent creating inspiring things.
Today's announcement by the Open Knowledge Foundation of the release of version 1.0 of the Open Database License (ODbL) will create resentment in both professions- information technologists need to understand some of its complications, and lawyers will need to understand some technological limits of the license. In this post, I will try to articulate what some of the hard bits are.