In 2003, Sean Gorman, a George Mason University graduate student, used public data to create a map of the U.S. fiber optic network and the businesses it connected as part of his Ph.D. dissertation. Impressive--except to those like former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who told The Washington Post the dissertation should be burned to keep it from terrorists.
Gorman's still trying to set public data free, but his latest effort has a profit motive --and is a bit less incendiary. By year's end, Gorman's startup company, FortiusOne, plans to open a public data repository and social network for data sharing to encourage online map mashups that combine multiple data sets....
Data sharing may be the next logical step in the movement toward open systems. But security concerns over what gets posted will continue. Gorman says FortiusOne won't post data the government considers sensitive.
The FortiusOne data repository could be an odd hodgepodge to start: U.S. census data and earthquake, landslide, and volcanic activity records, alongside the locations of bars and the addresses of spammers (based on work Gorman did for Spamhaus.org). Most of the data is available elsewhere, but having it aggregated and supported by a social network of data-sharing aficionados should make it much more useful, valuable, and perhaps controversial. Gorman says his company is cleaning up the data sets and annotating them in a community wiki....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/14/2006 01:59:00 PM.
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.
