Somehow a week’s slipped by since the Open Govt Data Barcamp and Hackfest in Wellington without me giving an update here.
It was a great event with around 150 people putting their heads together on the Saturday to brainstorm the why, where, who and how of making more government data readily available to the public in usable formats.
On the Sunday work started on a handful of projects including gathering case studies, fixmystreet.org.nz and a local version of the Sahana open source disaster management system. I wrote more about the event and the ideas underpinning it in a guest post on Idealog, and you can see more about the projects on the OpenNZ Wiki.
For a bit of background, you might want to watch Glen Barnes, one of the people behind the Open Data Catalogue, talking to Russell Brown on TVNZ’s Media7 about open data.
One of the themes of the barcamp was the need for structured data, a subject which is also relevant to the management of news content.
By structured I mean that the information in a document, database, spreadsheet – or news story – is consistently entered and marked up with additional information, or metadata, which describes the content in a way that machines and humans both can understand.
In the case of data it means parts of it can be extracted for use elsewhere. Think of pulling election polling data for a particular area and displaying it on a map – useful for your readers but only possible if the polling data is labelled in a way that a computer program can understand and if parts of the data – eg figures for a certain region – can be separated out and extracted on their own.
In the case of a news story it means people can see at a glance where the story was filed, when, by whom, what sources were used, its copyright licence and, perhaps, information on your editorial policy.
Among other things, this makes your stories more visible to search engines and therefore easier to find online, and boosts the value of your news archive by giving stories a longer and more useful life.
A project set up by the UK’s Media Standards Trust and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, with funding from the Knight Foundation and others, has come up with some straightforward suggestions for how news companies can better structure stories.
The project, Value Added News, has a nice introductory slide show about the value of semantic information and advice on how to add that information, using the hAtom and hNews microformats.
hAtom provides semantic information for basic aspects of a news story – such as who wrote it, who it was written for and when it was published. Information that should already be machine-readable but in most cases isn’t. Integrating hAtom will make key elements of your content machine readable, but won’t distinguish your content specifically as news or identify usage rights.
Value Added News Mark-Up (hnews)
To distinguish your content as news, and embed information about usage rights, a site should supp additional levels of semantic standards. For this we recommend hNews. hNews is an extension to the hAtom microformat developed in partnership with AP and released into the public domain.
This is interesting stuff and AP, for one, has begun using these microformats.
Incidentally, the election map I mentioned above was one of the projects that got under way at last weekend’s hackfest.
It could end up being a nice app that would sit well on a news website. Now’s probably a very good time for news organisations to take an interest in open data and in the geeks who bring out the value in it.
All Evolving Newsroom
Data, labels and the power of microformats
Somehow a week’s slipped by since the Open Govt Data Barcamp and Hackfest in Wellington without me giving an update here.
It was a great event with around 150 people putting their heads together on the Saturday to brainstorm the why, where, who and how of making more government data readily available to the public in usable formats.
On the Sunday work started on a handful of projects including gathering case studies, fixmystreet.org.nz and a local version of the Sahana open source disaster management system. I wrote more about the event and the ideas underpinning it in a guest post on Idealog, and you can see more about the projects on the OpenNZ Wiki.
For a bit of background, you might want to watch Glen Barnes, one of the people behind the Open Data Catalogue, talking to Russell Brown on TVNZ’s Media7 about open data.
One of the themes of the barcamp was the need for structured data, a subject which is also relevant to the management of news content.
By structured I mean that the information in a document, database, spreadsheet – or news story – is consistently entered and marked up with additional information, or metadata, which describes the content in a way that machines and humans both can understand.
In the case of data it means parts of it can be extracted for use elsewhere. Think of pulling election polling data for a particular area and displaying it on a map – useful for your readers but only possible if the polling data is labelled in a way that a computer program can understand and if parts of the data – eg figures for a certain region – can be separated out and extracted on their own.
In the case of a news story it means people can see at a glance where the story was filed, when, by whom, what sources were used, its copyright licence and, perhaps, information on your editorial policy.
Among other things, this makes your stories more visible to search engines and therefore easier to find online, and boosts the value of your news archive by giving stories a longer and more useful life.
A project set up by the UK’s Media Standards Trust and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, with funding from the Knight Foundation and others, has come up with some straightforward suggestions for how news companies can better structure stories.
The project, Value Added News, has a nice introductory slide show about the value of semantic information and advice on how to add that information, using the hAtom and hNews microformats.
This is interesting stuff and AP, for one, has begun using these microformats.
Incidentally, the election map I mentioned above was one of the projects that got under way at last weekend’s hackfest.
It could end up being a nice app that would sit well on a news website. Now’s probably a very good time for news organisations to take an interest in open data and in the geeks who bring out the value in it.