An evening talking about Open Data?? Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.

“I have been more actively engaged with the OKFN and have been virtually attending their monthly Open Science Working Group meetings during that period. A few weeks ago, I spotted this tweet on Twitter alerting people to OKFN’s ‘first’ [1]meet-up in Scotland. [tweet] ‘Attn Edinburgh folk – OK event on March 13th bit.ly/wPf2h8. Come discuss all things #OKFN @Scotland‘s 1st Meet-up! #OpenDataEDB — Naomi Lillie (@NaomiLillie) March 1, 2012’ Being a resident of Glasgow, with the meeting being held across in Edinburgh, I immediately added myself to the attendee list here... Mark MacGillvray was the first of eight of the individuals present to give a lightening talk. Mark talked a bit about openbiblio.net which went Beta late February 2012 and already contains over 30,000 records. Reference was also made to http://bibserver.org/which looked equally interesting. Next up was Roderic [Page] who introduced himself as a Professor of Taxonomy at Glasgow University. Rod’s talk was about the “Bibliography of Life” which contains 5 – 10 million species !! His talk was swiftly followed by that of Mahendra Mahey. Mahendra spoke about DevCSI which has been developed over the last three years. He advised that there are around 5,000 programmers/developers involved in the project here in the UK. There have been around 2,500 attendees of DEV8D events over the last four years with 7 future #DEV8D events planned for the future... Our next speaker was Laura Newman... She mentioned that OKFN has around 7,000 members and has approximately 20 working groups including International groups based in 5 Continents. Laura then told us about the Open Data Handbook.org initiative and that version 1.0 recently went online.  Straight after that, she told us about P2P University which in February had announced their School of Data venture. Around 200 people have already signed up... Ewan Klein... gave a general overview of Open Data and cited the likes of the 1901 Census Data and spoke of the importance of making Institutional data open. Mention was also made of Semantic Web mini-projects... Sam Leon... telling us about Public Domain Review.org which was about ‘open cultural knowledge and to promote the value of public domain, thus enriching society’. He described it further as a ‘commons of knowledge that can be drawn from’... Next followed two impromptu talks, the first one by Etienne Posthumus... about Iconclass.org and the work being done in the Netherlands in relation to linked open data... Etienne is a developer on the JISC/OKFN project Openbiblio2... The second impromptu talk and the last speaker of the event was given by Wilbert Kraan... Wilbert’s talk included showing us three projects being http://prod.cetis.ac.uk/,  http://kasabi.com/ and http://www.jiscmu.ac.uk/...”