After two successful Web of Data meetups in London with 200 guests each, it was time to bring the Web of Data meetup to Berlin.

Data Journalism and the new and exciting possibilities that the Web of Data opens up for creators and consumers of news and media online will be the topic of this first meetup.

We have a great lineup of speakers from media organisations like the BBC, The Guardian, the Deutsche Presse Agentur, the Bertelsmann Foundation, Los Angeles Times coming to Berlin and talking about data journalism and the latest development and projects in this field, and our friends from ZEIT Online and the Open Knowledge Foundation will join the discussion.

The event takes place at the office of our friends at Fjord in the heart of Berlin. Starting at 2pm, you’ll hear talks followed by a panel discussion and an open space for working groups, and when the official programme ends at 7pm we’ll of course have drinks with all of you.

Language of all talks at the event will be English, but don’t be surprised to hear a bit of German here and there in conversations.

Many thanks to Fjord and to the Open Knowledge Foundation for their help and support!

If you plan to come, please Sign Up and RSVP Yes on this page, as places will be limited.
Are you working on data journalism, data visualisation or data integration, and would you like to talk about your work at this or the next meetup? get in touch with us!

Programme:

2 pm venue opens / registration

2:15 pm first session
Welcome, Georgi Kobilarov (Uberblic Labs)
Tom Scott (Executive Product Manager, BBC Earth)
Gerd Kamp (Head of R&D, Deutsche Presse Agentur)
Jem Rayfield (Senior Technical Architect, BBC News)

3:45 pm break

4:30 pm second session
Martin Belam (Information Architect, The Guardian)
Ole Wintermann (Project Manager, Bertelsmann Foundation)
Jonathan Gray (Community Coordinator, The Open Knowledge Foundation)
Eric Ulken

5:45 pm open space session
two meeting rooms for barcamp style talks or working groups

6:30 pm panel discussion
see below, TBA

7:15 pm closing

drinks till 9pm
Speakers/panelists:

Tom Scott, BBC Earth
Martin Belam, The Guardian
Gerd Kamp, Deutsche Presse Agentur
Silver Oliver, BBC FM&T Journalism
Jem Rayfield, BBC FM&T Journalism
Ole Wintermann, Bertelsmann Foundation
Georgi Kobilarov, Uberblic Labs
Christian Heise, ZEIT Online
Sascha Venohr, ZEIT Online
Eric Ulken, L.A. Times

Title: Jahreshauptversammlung des Open Data Network e.V.
Location: Newthinking store, Berlin
Description: Liebe Vereinsmitglieder,

Der Termin für die ordentliche Jahreshauptversammlung 2010 des Open Data Network e.V. steht fest.

Zeit: Donnerstag, der 26. August, 19 bis 21 Uhr

Ort: Newthinking Store
Tucholskystr. 48
10117 Berlin

Die Tagesordnung für die Jahreshauptversammlung ist wie folgt:

§1 Begrüßung der Jahreshauptversammlung
§2 Wahl des Versammlungsleiters
§3 Wahl des Protokollführers
§4 Beschlussfassung über die Tagesordnung
§5 Vorstellung des Tätigkeitsbericht 2010 durch den Vorstand
§6 Vorstellung des Kassenberichtes 2010 durch den Vorstand
§7 Vorstellung der Satzungsänderungen durch den Vorstand
§8 Beschlussfassung über die Satzungsänderungen
§9 Entlastung des Vorstandes
§10 Wahl des Vorstands
§11 Wahl der Rechnungsprüfer/innen
§12 Sonstiges

Ich freue mich euch auf der ordentliche Jahreshauptversammlung des Open Data Network e.V. 2010 begrüßen zu können.

Beste Grüße
Daniel

–
Daniel Dietrich
Vorstandsvorsitzender

Open Data Network e.V.
Erich-Weinert-Str. 17
D – 10439 Berlin

Vereinsregisternummer: 95 VR 292 08 B
Steuernummer: 27/674/52290

Mobil: +49 (0) 171 780 870 3
Mail: daniel@opendata-network.org
Web: http://opendata-network.org
Twitter: @opendatanetwork
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2010-08-26
End Time: 21:00

According to statements of the new German minister for development cooperation, Dirk Niebel, transparency and accountability are very high on the agenda in German Development cooperation. However, looking more closely it seems that this commitment only holds as long as the transparency and accountability of other stakeholders are concerned.

In 2008 Germany signed the International Aid Transparency Initiative in Accra and promised together with other major donors “We will make aid more transparent.” At the recent steering committee meeting in Paris, however, the German position was more than disappointing. On the 7th of July 2010 donors agreed on data standards for aid information that is already available at the donor level and should be made publicly available. While most donors will aim to adopt these standards before the next High Level Meeting in November 2011 in Seoul, the German representative clearly announced that Germany will not be able to meet this timetable.

Of course, Germany governmental development cooperation is undergoing a major organisational change. Of course, a donor like Germany with many smaller projects faces more challenges than donors with large percentages of budget support. But the reluctance of Germany seems to go beyond technical problems and touch upon a more fundamental recognition of the value of open data. Research on the merits of transparency presented in Accra and the IATI consultations with CSOs and recipient countries clearly point to the importance of detailed financial information. Despite this, the German representative at the steering committee questioned the value of detailed transaction-level data: “Who will use it?” Also on the critical issue of forward-looking data to allow financial planning in recipient countries Germany was very sceptical with regards to the validity of such data.

It would probably be helpful to have more information about how exactly Germany views the IATI process and what the official BMZ position on IATI is. But unfortunately, there is no information about this available on the BMZ website. Seriously, Mr. Niebel, how important is aid transparency in Germany?

Guestpost from Markus Freitag from the Govwild team. GovWILD was started as a bachelor’s project of seven students from the Hasso Plattner Institute of Potsdam in October 2009. The purpose of the project is to reveal new information and connections in government data by linking existent information as well as providing a new level of transparency. Large amounts of data from the US and the EU are connected with Open Data from various sources.

The goal is to create a new unified data set that comprises enriched information and connections between objects which appear in the original heterogeneous sources. Therefore, an integration process including extracting, cleansing, merging and fusing steps is built. Our project team implemented the process in a scalable Hadoop environment with JAQL as query language. All data sources which are used for this project provide official data published by the corresponding government except for the Freebase data. The following table shows all acquired data sources with information about size, given format, number of tuples (entries/rows) and the number of attributes we used from this source (e.g. names, addresses, amounts).

US-Spending lists the expenses of the US federal government. It provides data about the contracted companies, the responsible agencies and the purpose of the spending. The listed sponsors are
the responsible agencies.

US-Earmarks includes data of earmarks spent by the US government. Earmarks are long-term fundings for programs or projects. This source contains information about the responsible politicians and the recipients, which are mostly companies.

US-Congress provides information on all actual and former members of the US Congress. It includes also biographical information.

EU-Financial Transparency System (FTS) specifies all funds spent by the EU. It contains the amount of funds, the address and the name of the recipient and the funding agency.

EU-Parliament is the equivalent to US-Congress. It contains information about all members of the European Parliament.

DE-Party Donations is the German equivalent to FEC. This source includes data of the spendings German parties received from persons or companies.

DE-Agricultural Subsidies lists all German subsidies which are funded for agricultural purposes. Recipients are either persons or companies.

Freebase provides a huge amount of user generated data. In this project, only data about persons, especially politicians, and companies is used.

The article here (german) points out various difficulties of the project. Besides the web application, we provide the data as a SQL database dump, RDF triples and JSON files for download. The future work will focus on acquiring more sources especially from Germany and providing a better interface and visualization for the data. The project as a bachelor’s work is finished, but we are going to continue it with three students. The HPI supports our work until the end of 2010. After that, the future of the project depends on sponsors and external financial support, which we are optimistic to find :).

GovWild started on July 12 during a live interview on RBB Radio 1.