Fiona Bradley, A database of data, Semantic Library, April 16, 2008. Excerpt:
...[L]ibraries may have missed an opportunity. We have been recommending and linking to various datasets on our websites for years, but there is a huge potential to go beyond this and build something collaboratively and use it as an input for different libraries. Many libraries now take in Open Access Journal records to their catalogues and search engines via DOAJ but there is no reason to not do something similar for Open Data.
Certainly, it is an issue that few of these datasets can talk to each other - but perhaps the move towards a more standards-based Semantic Web will encourage standardisation and interoperability, at least within, for example, individual government departments so that Census records can be analysed against education records....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/16/2008 10:08:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.