Yesterday, Javascript developers around the world were affected by broken builds and failed installations due to a number of open source packages being removed from the NPM package manager. The significant package was called "left-pad". It's a simple piece of utility code which has become a direct (and indirect) dependency for many, many other packages and software … Continue reading left-pad and the data commons
Category: The Commons
Ignore the Bat Caves and Marketplaces: lets talk about Zoning
Cities are increasingly the place where interesting work is happening within the broader open data community. Cities, of any size, have a well defined area of influence, a ready made community and are becoming instrumented with sensors. The latter is either explicit, through the installation of devices by local government or implicit via the data automatically collected by … Continue reading Ignore the Bat Caves and Marketplaces: lets talk about Zoning
Everyone loves a laser
It's been really interested to watch how the recently published Environment Agency (EA) LIDAR data has been seized on by a variety of communities to create interesting, fun and useful tools. For many people, myself included, learning about LIDAR has been an interesting experience. It's a technology that suddenly seems to be everywhere and which can … Continue reading Everyone loves a laser
Digital public institutions for the information commons?
I've been thinking a bit about "the commons" recently. Specifically, the global information commons that is enabled and supported by Creative Commons (CC) licences. This covers an increasingly wide variety of content as you can see in their recent annual review. The review unfortunately doesn't mention data although there's an increasing amount of that published using … Continue reading Digital public institutions for the information commons?
Improving the global open data index
The 2015 edition of the Global Open Data Index was published this week. From what I've seen it's the result of an enormous volunteer effort and there's a lot to celebrate. For example, the high ranking of Rwanda resulting from ongoing efforts to improve their open data publication. Owen Boswarva has also highlighted the need for the … Continue reading Improving the global open data index
We have a long way to go
Stood in the queue at the supermarket earlier I noticed the cover of the Bath Chronicle. The lead story this week is: "House prices in Bath almost 13 times the average wage". This is almost perfectly designed clickbait for me. I can't help but want to explore the data. In fact I've already done this before, … Continue reading We have a long way to go
How can open data publishers monitor usage?
Some open data publishers require a user to register with their portal or provide other personal information before downloading a dataset. For example: the recently launched Consumer Data Research Centre data portal requires users to register and login before data can be downloaded access to any of the OS Open Data products requires the completion of a form which … Continue reading How can open data publishers monitor usage?
Who is the intended audience for open data?
This post is part of my ongoing series: basic questions about data. It's intended to expand on a point that I made in a previous post in which I asked: who uses data portals? At times I see quite a bit of debate within the open data community around how best to publish data. For example should … Continue reading Who is the intended audience for open data?
Managing risks when publishing open data
A question that I frequently encounter when talking to organisations about publishing open data is: "what if someone misuses or misunderstands our data?". These concerns stem from several different sources: that the data might be analysed incorrectly, drawing incorrect conclusions that might be attributed to the publisher that the data has known limitations and this might reflect … Continue reading Managing risks when publishing open data
Fictional data
The phrase "fictional data" popped into my head recently, largely because of odd connections between a couple of projects I've been working on. It's stuck with me because, if you set aside the literal meaning of "data that doesn't actually exist", there are some interesting aspects to it. For example the phrase could apply to: … Continue reading Fictional data
Lost Boy 