Open Government Data Poster

Ton and James Burke created the Open Government Data Poster to help civil servants decide if and how it is ok to open up data sets they have available.

Also available in PDF (English) version.

Posted via email from pedrocustodio’s posterous

Open Declaration on European Public Services

Endorse the Open Declaration!

Let’s improve European public services together.

On November 19th, the EU governments will meet in Malmo to sign a Ministerial Declaration that will define the key priorities for e-government strategy in Europe for the next years.

A group of Web 2.0 enthusiasts launched an open collaborative effort to build an Open Declaration on European Public Services, which calls on European governments to embrace the values of transparency, participation and empowerment and so improve public services. The European Commission and the Swedish Presidency of the EU have accepted that we present the declaration in the official program of the Ministerial Conference.

We now need to collect thousands of endorsements in order to convince governments to fully embrace these values.

If you share the values of the Open Declaration, please add your name in this form. Together we can make a difference!

If you agree, you may sign it and then join the Facebook Group to start spreading the word.

MICROFORMATS: getting mainstream?

Being a fan of the so called Semantic Web and knowing the long way we still have to track to reach it, all the things that takes us a bit closer to it has me on board. So it has been with Microformats, I had played a bit with Structured Blogging before but rapidly moved to what was ended up being known by Microformats for their multipurpose and not just for blogging.

A brief introduction for non-geek persons about Microformats and why they’ll became ever so important: The web is full of information, trapped information, hidden relations, hidden contents, consider for instance a simple news article, a review in a product page, that information is trapped under the rumble of it’s page HTML. Not nice, isn’t it? Through the separation of layout/content we already improved, since we can read each one of those examples hiding the details of the document structure focusing on the information thats important!

Being intelligent beings as we tend to consider ourselves, we have the ability to spot which parts of the information are relevant, if I look at a contact page, I immediately search for something that looks like an address, phone or email contact. It’s something we’re used to. Well the problem raises that when it matters with information we really can’t depend on humans!

To a program reading a regular webpage, all that rumble and layout information, etc. is just the same! That’s were Microformats became essential! They allow us to seemingly “format” that information, so that humans and machines alike are able to extract the REALLY important parts! Microformats are much more than that, but for today’s introduction that the key idea to retain.

After some of the big companies embraced them a few months ago, Microformats seemed to be on the right track for massive adoption, and yesterday the all mighty W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) seems to have given a step the consolidation of Microformats by providing a set of use cases (GRDDL) that provide real-world scenarios and examples of Microformat in use, as they quote it:

(…)
GRDDL is the bridge for turning data expressed in an XML format (such as XHTML) into Semantic Web data. With GRDDL, authors transform the data they wish to share into a format that can be used and transformed again for more rigorous applications.
(…)
Once data is part of the Semantic Web, it can be merged with other data (for example, from a relational database, similarly exposed to the Semantic Web) for queries, inferences, and conversion to other formats.(…)

I strongly suggest reading some of thew3c use cases:

• Use case #1: Scheduling.
• Use case #2: Single-purpose XML records.
• Use case #3: Aggregating Reviews.
• Use case #4: Digital Libraries and Content Managment.
• Use case #5: Meta powered Wiki.
• Use case #6: XForms.
• Use case #7: XML schemas.
• (…)

As complementary to the Microformats Website, the nice to have in hand Microformats Cheat Sheet and the book written by John Allsopp: “Microformats: Empowring Your Markup for Web 2.0 “

For people reading this here in the Portuguese quarter I promise that in coming weeks you’ll get your opportunity to learn a bit more about Microformats! enough said!

Social Networks Bill of Rights

Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington co-authered a proposal for a Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web/Networks available under the Open Social Web website.

According to this proposition for a bill of rights, every Social Network and/or Application should guarantee 3 fundamental USER rights

• Ownership of their own personal information: own profile data, the list of people they are connected to and the the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

which in practice means that this services should display the following features:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

As further reading about this interoperability problem between different services and networks, I strongly suggest that you watch both Brad’s Fitzpatrick slides and read his “Thoughts on the Social Graph”:

FEEDblendr

Here’s something that I’ve been using to create new types of feeds from existing feeds.I’m using it right now to create a unique photolog that combines photos from different fotosharing sites, but I’ve also built my own news feed by combining the feed from diferent media sources in portugal, sources I’ve selected, kind of my own editorial feed, where I only get news from those I’ve decided to listen for.

If you find interesting it lives here: http://feedblendr.com/

Technorati Tags: feed syndication join

Google News Syndicated!

Well, Google just released their news content for syndication.RSS and Atom feeds available depending readers preference.

Forms on RSS

Since the list of blogs I read on a daily basis is getting bigger and bigger, I decided some months ago to subscribe them via RSS, to keep updated with all the new posts.

It has happened to me, while reading some of the posts that I really would love to comment, but that implies clicking on the news-reader, opening the page, sometimes even click on the comments links, and only then I’m able to post my comment, I must confess I have kind of small short term memory, so by the time I get to the comment form, I already forgot about what I wanted to say!

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