[okfn-discuss] Panton Principles and IsItOpen

Tue Feb 23 19:32:26 UTC 2010

On 22 February 2010 17:08, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the launch(es) of PP and IIO.
> Cameron and I presented these at the Science Commons meeting on Saturday
> 20th feb in Redmond - there were about 70 people there but a lot more
> following on Twitter and Chris Pirillo's live video stream.

That's really good to hear.

> I got a very strong feeling that Open Data has arrived and I think the Open
> Data button is a major tool for dissemination. I have already suggested to
> my collaborators at Microsoft that we should create an OpenDataButton
> add-in. This could be similar to their CC add-in. Alternatively anyone
> writing software (as we have been doing in Chem4Word) should be able to add
> an "OpenData" statement to the output. In our case we would expect to have
> an "OpenData" button on the MS ribbon which the user could enable or
> disable. If enabled then all documents would carry appropriate RDF licence,
> links, statement, etc.

This is a great idea. What exactly do we need to do to integrate this?
We could also do some more work on the buttons. We were thinking of an
"I Support Open Data" button as well the existing "open data" buttons
which are there to show data is open.

> I'd be grateful on what this should look like. It should be easy with XML or
> HTML as this can be emebedded in a comment as CC does. It's more difficult
> for fixed formats such as CSV. It could be very useful indeed for images
> where it could appear in the metadata or even as a small part of the image
> visible to the reader.

Completely agree. What we've got already on
<http://www.opendefinition.org/buttons/> already works on XML and HTML
I think. As you say for CSV this is harder -- personally I think for
CSV or much other stuff you want a separate README.txt though I guess
that runs the risk that the openness information is separated from the
data.
.
> PS. I can't remember how much I showed of IIO - it should be on the video. I
> didn't show any crashes - thanks to all who mended/tried_to_mend the system
> at short notice. Has the problem been pinned down?

Indeed it has -- and annoyingly minor it was (one was an bad html
issue, and the other was do with lack of an "owner" on older IIO
requests)! Despite quite a bit trying I haven't been able to break
anything since these were fixed Sunday morning so fingers crossed
everything is now working well ...

PPS: your point about email addresses was already in our minds and
we've now got a ticket
<http://knowledgeforge.net/okfn/tasks/ticket/257> We'll hope to get
this implemented and deployed asap.