Around a year ago, Tim Berners-Lee stood in front of the TED Conference and had the delegates chanting ‘Raw Data Now’. In the six-minute talk below, Berners-Lee is back in front of TED reporting on developments of the last 12-months that mean much of the raw data is flowing.
The video includes some great hat-tips to the work of people like Paul Clarke, the Open Knowledge Foundation team, NewsPaper Club, ITO World and other UK-based innovators. Having been down in London yesterday to see Tim Berners-Lee, along with a number of other fantastic panelists, also exploring questions of open and linked data at the ‘Why Study the Web?’ Web Science Trust event yesterday, and then watching this video has been really useful in helping develop the ‘elevator pitch’ for my research.
I’m interested in why it is that the particular things that have been built with open data are the ones that have been built.
What are the features of the data; the way it is formatted and presented; the available tools for working with it; and crucially, the people who work with it and their communities and networks; that lead to the sorts of innovations we’re seeing on top of open raw data provision.
Next week, when my methods essays and exams are out the way, I plan to start in earnest on getting in touch with many of the people mentioned in Tim’s TED talk, and many other using open data, to line up some conversations to explore those themes more…
But for now – back to statistics revision and staring at R and wondering quite why a stat’s packaged that invariably requires some searching for How To’s choose such an un-googleable name…
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