Last week, I wrote a little about Open Data. At the time, I meant to point to a recent episode of O’Reilly’s Distributing the Future podcast, so this is a post to rectify my oversight and to expand a little.

The podcast is from 29 August this year, and includes a number of relevant items. The one that particularly resonated with me was towards the end, when Tim O’Reilly had a conversation with Flickr’s Chad Dickerson about some of the ways in which his company is interacting with those who might traditionally have simply been considered competitors;

“There’s been a bit of a controversy surrounding Flickr’s APIs. What if a company created a business out of collecting all of the Share Alike photos from Flickr and offering them up on a DVD? What about another company that takes advantage of Flickr’s APIs to let you move your own photos from Flickr to its service? The answers that emerge from this conversation between Tim O’Reilly and Yahoo’s Chad Dickerson might not be what you’d expect. The issue is fair commercial and non-commercial use of the Flickr APIs. Chad explains.”

Some of Chad’s ideas around reciprocal access to APIs are particularly compelling, as is the comment that user loyalty to Flickr may - in large part - be due to the ease with which they can leave!

Robert Kaye, reporting on this summer’s OSCON conference, wrote;

“Many keynotes and presenters mentioned Open Data. Since there isn’t a commonly accepted definition of this term, a lot of people applied this moniker to a broad variety of concepts. Open data and open APIs were often mentioned in the same sentence and many other concepts that apply to open source were grafted onto data, acknowledging that data being open will be as powerful as open source. However, the most serious hint that open data is about to hit the big times was when Danese Cooper handed me an OSI flyer that outlined the core principles behind an open data definition. Having been trying to raise the open data meme at past OSCONs I’m pleased to see that this topic has finally risen high enough that I expect a lot more coverage of this concept next year.”

Discussing another O’Reilly event, Christine Herron offers a good piece on an ‘Open Data Standards Redux‘ from FOO.

“The challenge of open data standards is working its way back to the forefront of attention. At FOO, a group of us sat down to discuss openly owned repositories of data, and how we could gather momentum around a summit-style dialogue to dissect the issue and start to work on a balanced solution. There is an unnerving variety of data that consumers should own, or at least have access to - school records, medical records, etc. It’s not just about Flickr streams. We need both an open standard data format, and an open standard for how to get data”

I’m sure she didn’t mean to miss libraries off her list!

At Talis we look forward to participating in this incredibly important debate. Just what do libraries want their peers, their patrons, their vendors, Google and the rest to be able to do with data? Which of our current restrictions are practical? Which are even ethical? Having looked at existing licences and found them unable to cope with the particular issues around data, we have offered the TCL for discussion, and its stipulations underpin current contributions of data to the Platform. The TCL is certainly a step along the road, and we look forward to further scrutiny of this.

Libraries stand at an important place in the growing awareness around ownership and use of data. We have much to offer, and we have to participate. At Talis we will be doing so. We welcome input from across the library sector, and trust that our fellow vendors have the good sense to lift their heads from out of the sand and to start thinking an awful lot more creatively about opening data for ourselves and for everyone else.

Another short quote to end, this one from Tim O’Reilly himself;

“Open Data. One day soon, tomorrow’s Richard Stallman will wake up and realize that all the software distributed in the world is free and open source, but that he still has no control to improve or change the computer tools that he relies on every day. They are services backed by collective databases too large (and controlled by their service providers) to be easily modified. Even data portability initiatives such as those starting today merely scratch the surface, because taking your own data out of the pool may let you move it somewhere else, but much of its value depends on its original context, now lost.”

Indeed. So what’s it going to be? Preservation of the innovation-stifling and ethically questionable lock-down of a community’s data? Or some bravery and leadership to challenge the practices of the past, which have no place in the world of today?

I know which I’d rather see, and I know how to pay for it.

Technorati Tags: FOO, Library 2.0, open data, OSCON, DTF, Talis, Talis Community Licence, Talis Community License, TDN, Trust, Web 2.0

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