[open-government] [euopendata] Idea: screen scraping sprint

Fri Oct 1 16:26:55 UTC 2010

Nicholas: good point. While some prospective reusers may well be
interested in gathering data regardless of its legal status (here I'm
thinking in particular of, e.g., community driven efforts to scrape
online web sources in the US, where the situation vis-a-vis rights in
data is much less clear than in European countries!) we should be
careful not to encourage people to scrape material that is clearly
copyrighted, or where government explicitly reserves rights/prohibits
(certain kinds of) reuse.

I read Antti's message to suggest we focus on public information which
is currently not *technically* open (e.g. it is in PDF format, or
published in unstructured form on an HTML website, ...), rather than
information which is currently not *legally* open. Of course there are
(sadly) still many grey areas here!

For public bodies, I think this is a great opportunity to:

  1.  demonstrate that there is demand for raw structured data from
prospective reusers
  2.  demonstrate what needs to be done in order to reuse unstructured
data (and hence hopefully encourage public bodies to publish raw
machine-readable data wherever possible!)
  3.  hopefully show some interesting reuses of information that has
been scraped

This would be a great thing to talk about more at the open government
data camp event in November, for those of you who are there:
http://opengovernmentdata.org/camp2010/

Antti, Aidan: would you be happy to lead a planning session on this?

On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 6:12 PM, Nicolas Kayser-Bril <nkb at owni.fr> wrote:
> A worldwide "reclaim your data" event?
> I like the approach, but it might be seen as a bit aggressive, don't you
> think? In any case, I think open-data activists in France would be
> interested in this. We have an opendata camp coming up, I'll pitch the idea
> to the organizers.
> Nicolas Kayser-Bril
> --
> Datajournalist at OWNI.fr
> Berlin: +49 174 472 2256
> Paris: +336 50 57 53 80
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 6:04 PM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> Great idea, Antti!
>>
>> Sounds like something that the OKF would be very interested in
>> supporting. Also we should *definitely* talk to Scraper Wiki about
>> this!
>>
>> Aine, Aidan, Julian: what do you think? ;-)
>>
>> (Also cc'ing international open government data list…)
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Antti Poikola <antti.poikola at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >  Hi people,
>> >
>> > I just got an idea that we could organize maybe even global screen
>> > scraping
>> > day/camp/sprint with the idea to create open API:s to government data by
>> > programming screen scrapers to existing public, but technically not open
>> > data sources?
>> >
>> > So far just a vague idea... anybody interested to brainstorm it further?
>> >
>> > -Jogi
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > euopendata mailing list
>> > euopendata at lists.okfn.org
>> > http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/euopendata
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jonathan Gray
>>
>> Community Coordinator
>> The Open Knowledge Foundation
>> http://blog.okfn.org
>>
>> http://twitter.com/jwyg
>> http://identi.ca/jwyg
>>
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>> open-government at lists.okfn.org
>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government
>
>

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
http://identi.ca/jwyg