The Butt Ugly Weblog

You're welcome to the next Aula Talk on open data movement by Matt Biddulph. Time and place: Thursday August 17th at 18:00, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), 6th floor, Pinta-building, High Tech Center (HTC), Ruoholahti, Tammasaarenkatu 3, Helsinki

"Open data movement – the next wave of open source"

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. Programmers, students, and companies are building mashups by overlaying photos, blog posts, and other objects to open datasets like the BBC Programme Catalogue, Wikipedia, Open Streetmap, and Thinglink.

As a case in point, Biddulph will describe how the BBC's database of programming from the 1950s to the present day was transformed from an internal green-screen application to a public Web 2.0 service using Ruby on Rails. Expect to see some playful examples of what you could do with it and other open datasets.