[okfn-discuss] open shakespeare

Mon May 22 13:30:21 UTC 2006

There are already very impressive examples of open knowledge in the form 
of projects such as wikipedia, publicwhip, the world-wide molecular 
matrix etc.

However it would be nice to have something a little simpler, some sort 
of 'hello world' type open knowledge project, which would illustrate 
what we mean by open knowledge and why it is useful. Such a project in 
addition to its illustrative role would also provide a very valuable 
use-case for tools and processes involved in open knowledge development. 
It would also be a good opportunity to try and pick a project that could 
be easily packaged for reuse by others -- this being something which 
slightly differentiates it from the above examples.

To this end after various discussions the idea of working with 
Shakespeare was mooted. Shakespeare seems to fit the bill pretty well:
   * (Almost) Universal -- everyone knows shakespeare
   * Shakespeare's out of copyright but there is still some legal issues 
to illustrate the problems of closed knowledge
   * Plenty of need for versioning, bugfixing etc
   * Nice idea of an overall package consisting of the texts, 
commentary, search tool

Thus back in December I sketched out the first bare outlines of this as 
an OKF project in the incubator:
   http://www.okfn.org/wiki/ShakespeareKnowledgePackage

Since then a bit of work has been done -- mainly in spare time here and 
there -- and there is now the rudiments of a package:

   http://www.knowledgeforge.net/project/shakespeare/
   https://project.knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/svn/

What do people think? Is shakespeare a good place to start? What other 
possibilities are there? And finally, last but not least, is there 
anyone who would like to get involved in working on this.

Regards,

Rufus