[open-government] New French data catalogue?

[Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou]

Dear Jonathan and everyone on these mailing-lists,

Sorry for our late reply, we've been quite busy here the past few
weeks after publishing our latest study on MP's presence which had
quite the press coverage:
http://www.nosdeputes.fr/confiseurs/index.php
We've been reading your e-mails though and definitely wanted to answer
all of them so here it is!

The Open Government Data Camp sounds a thrill and we definitely want
to be part of it, 18-19th of november sounds good to us.

Which brings us to the french initiatives you've been enquiring us about :
- DataLift is a 3 year scientific research project intended to provide
a semantic layer over sets of data. We're in touch with their authors
and will provide them some data to work with. The project is more
about semantic data than open data. Some of their partners are not
really fond of open licences. We have anyway good contacts with
François Scharffe, the leader of the projet.
- DataPublica is a publicly funded start-up intended to create some
kind of data.gov here in France but unfortunately, and like you sound
to suspect, it seems so far that it is not going towards real open
standards or licences. To get a maximum of data, they agreed with the
public authorities of the APIE to pass on with their restrictive
licences even though this administration has a rival project. They
will present an alpha in September and are supposed to launch the
whole thing in December. We are in contact with their consultant
François Bancilhon and should have a round-table with him and other
actors about public data at the Open World Forum in Paris.

We will launch ourselves as promised a french instance of CKAN as a
citizen datagov by the fall and we're seriously considering some sort
of HackThatDataDay in October or November with other organisations to
fill it with data!

Here's for our update! Talk to you all soon ;)

Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou for Regards Citoyens



On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 03:40, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:
> Hmm.. sounds a lot like a data catalogue! Hope the metadata in the
> catalogue is made open!
>
> http://www.epsiplatform.eu/news/news/french_startup_companies_developing_an_open_data_project
>
> "Data Publica, an open data project, has provided the following
> preliminary announcement about their exciting project which is under
> development. [...] A consortium of three French startup companies are
> leading the project development. The main project objectives are to
> build and manage a market place where: (i) public and private
> organisations which own data can publish their metadata, the way to
> access the corresponding data and the license under which it is
> usable; (ii) Internet and mobile application developers can search and
> visualise the metadata, create new applications and deploy them by
> using the data according the licenses granted."
>
> Benoit, Tangui, Benjamin: any thoughts on this from you guys (in
> particular re: overlap/intersection with French CKAN instance)?
> Presume you are in touch with Data Publica?
>
> --
> Jonathan Gray
>
> Community Coordinator
> The Open Knowledge Foundation
> http://blog.okfn.org
>
> http://twitter.com/jwyg
> http://identi.ca/jwyg
>