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

Fri Oct 1 20:22:04 UTC 2010

Hi all,

big +1 from my end. @Antti: this is a real great idea. @others: yes, let's be careful publicly encouraging people to screen scrape legally not open gov data.

I love the idea of making this an interlined global ogd hackday. I would also love to support this event through the open data network with a local hacking / scraping event.

Best regards
Daniel

On Oct 1, 2010, at 6:26 PM, Jonathan Gray wrote:

> 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
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> open-government mailing list
>>> 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
> 
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