The OKCon2011 – the Open Knowledge Conference 2011 – took place in Berlin this year on the 30th of June and the 1st of July 2011. The first time the main event of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) took place in a different place then London.
There were about 400 participants in a very interesting 2 days programme all about the topic of open knowledge: from open science via open images up to one of the main topics this year: open (government) data. In 2 main tracks and 2 parallel workshop tracks at the really beautiful location Kalkscheune Berlin speakers like Richard Stallman, Glyn Moody, Nigel Shadbolt or Michael Bauwens just to name a few that come to my mind and many many others presented their topics and ideas around the conference topic.
The LOD2 consortium that has also been invoved into the organisation of the event held a workshop on open linguistic (by Sebastian Hellmann, ULEI) and also had several talks at the Kalkscheune. Chris Bizer (FUB) presented mechanisms of how to consume linked (open) data (lod) for several purposes as well as introduced software tools for this lod consumption. Furthermore the LOD2 Open Government Data Stakeholder Survey was presented in the evening of the first conference day: Michael Martin (ULEI) and Martin Kaltenböck (Semantic Web Company) presented on the one hand the summary of the survey results as well as on the other hand the process and results of turning these survey results into linked (open) data to an interested audience – the detailed results of the OGD stakeholder survey are available in the form of HTML and PDF as well as the raw data of these results in CSV and RDF (linked open data) format for re-use under CC-BY license under: http://survey.lod2.eu.
On the 2nd day of the OKCon2011 Andreas Blumauer of the Semantic Web Company presented his vision for open data inside of the enterprise and pointed out that open data principles can also be used behind companies firewalls – but he also pointed out that there are different rules and requirements in enterprises on open data then e.g. on the side of the civil society or the public administration.
As a conclusion Andreas showed the benfit of linked open data for data integration of open (government) data into the data warehouse of the enterprise – and asked the open data community to keep in mind that the linked before the open data is an important step to deal with when working with open data – he ended with an amazing demo of the power of linked open data (LOD) where he showed how to create new knowledge out of the OKCon2011 programme by analysing the text of the programme and receiving related information from DBpedia via linked data mechanisms…
But not only the LOD2 consortium presented linked open data mechanisms – also John Sheridan of the National Archives UK built his talk of business models around the linked data system of legislation.gov.uk or developer Jeni Tennison presented the architecture of legisaltion.gov.uk on top of RDF and linked open data.
Beside the official programme there was a lot of space to discuss (linked) open (government) data projects and activities in mainly EU countries – as in Spain, Austria, Switzerland or the Netherlands with participans representing official open government data initiatives of the named countries et al. And to discuss linked open data principles and the benefit these principles and technologies can bring in the area of open (government) data, open information, open content etc.
After 2 days of a very intense programme at the OKCon2011 we do think that the LOD2 consortium brought the idea and benefits of linked open data into parts of the open knowledge community meeting in Berlin – and also the LOD2 consortium could bring a lot of interesting ideas et al about open knowledge back home!
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