Google Europe Blog: June 2010

The UK’s public data tsunami gathers speed

Thursday, June 17, 2010

When the British Government said at the beginning of May that they would be releasing a ‘tsunami of public data’ you had to wonder whether reality would match up to the rhetoric. Oh ye of little faith... A fortnight ago, the Government released hundreds of new datasets - including a full list of Government expenditure - and this week, Transport for London announced that they too would be releasing lots of their transport data for free to the public.

The policy itself is not new. It was kicked off in the UK back in 2009 by Sir Tim Berners Lee and has resulted in the establishment of the data.gov site as the primary place for public data to be accessed. But the new Government has sent some strong signals from the top that it is an even greater priority for them to get government departments and agencies to shift from being information hoarders to information sharers.

This new mood makes it a really exciting time for the data geeks amongst us in the UK. It’s clear that the new British Government is getting as excited about data as the developer community itself, and that it is determined to be a European - and perhaps even global - leader in transparency. Countries around the world are waking up to the huge potential for re-use of data financed by the taxpayer. There are good social and democratic arguments behind this policy - but it also makes economic sense. If Governments want to stimulate the national growth of their local Internet economy, making data public for developers to reuse is a great way to build skills and position the country for data based business models of the future.

But, as we all know, the usability of the data is just as important as the data itself. To the ordinary citizen, a gargantuan list of numbers means nothing. Data only becomes useful when it is rendered accessible to the citizen: the task traditionally of statisticians and, increasingly, creative web developers who ‘mash’ different data sets, drop them into data crunching tools and turn them into citizen friendly applications. From Tube schedules to postcode databases, information works best when it can be overlaid with other datasets and correlations can be made, as services such as those created by the Government’s new Transparency Advisor, Tom Steinberg.

Some departments and agencies have been better than others at releasing data in truly useful ways. A machine readable format rather than in a PDF is preferable - so that developers spend as little time as possible manually reformatting and more time innovating. And there should be as few ‘strings’ attached as possible so developers can easily reuse it, mash it up, and create new tools and services. These details matter - and the next step for the UK officials behind the public data agenda is to ensure that all data released has consistently high standards of usability.

We hope this is the start of something big and that, rather than a one-off tidal wave, this becomes an ever flowing river of information that is released.

Posted by Sarah Hunter, UK Policy Manager.

Unlocking our shared cultural heritage: Google partners with the Austrian National Library

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Gregor Mendel, the nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian scientist, is an ancestor of modern genetic studies. His paper, Experiments on Plant Hybrids, helped early twentieth century scientists make new discoveries about genetics and hybridity. Several of Mendel’s works now reside in the original in the Austrian National Library, alongside other important works of European and human culture, science and history. Among the other treasures contained in the library are Martin Luther’s first complete translation of the Christian bible, and several of the works of the Renaissance-era doctor and philosopher, Paracelsus.

Today we’re announcing an agreement with the Austrian National Library to digitize works from the library, bringing its rare and unique collection to a global audience through Google Books. The library was founded in the fourteenth century, and it was intended to become the universal human library, containing books in German, Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, among other languages. It contains the first ever printed book in Slovene, the oldest known prints in Bulgarian and an extensive collection of Czech and Hungarian works.

Through this agreement, the library will select up to 400,000 public domain books from its collections. Google will then digitize these works, making them available to anyone in the world with access to the web. This is a great step in our aim to help make the world’s books accessible to anyone with a connection to the Internet. We’re not alone in this aim. Around Europe and the rest of the world, an increasing number of organizations are running ambitious and promising book digitization projects, including the European Union’s own Europeana. We're very supportive of these efforts, because we want to see these books have the broadest reach possible. The books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana and in other digital libraries.

Through a proliferation of projects such as these, and through more partnerships between private and public bodies, important works like those owned by the Austrian National Library can have tremendous reach. Earlier this year we announced a partnership with the Italian Ministry of Culture to digitize books. Today’s announcement is the next step towards the goal of preserving and disseminating Europe’s cultural heritage.

The Austrian National Library is our tenth library partner in Europe, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners. By working with these important institutions, we can help to unlock and democratize access to the world's cultural heritage.

Posted by Annabella Weisl, Strategic Partner Manager, Google Books

Brussels debates Open Internet on 10 June

Friday, June 4, 2010

Brussels will debate the European Union’s new digital agenda when the Open Forum Europe (OFE) holds its annual summit next Thursday, 10 June, in Brussels. After a keynote speech from Commissioner Neelie Kroes, Google’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond will speak. He will outline his take on the next wave of innovations on the Internet - and what policies are required to ensure the Internet creates the maximum social and economic benefits.

OFE, supported by a number of tech companies including Google, advocates an open, competitive European IT market. The summit’s packed agenda promises interesting debates on a range of subjects such as new innovation models, e-government and digital citizenship. If you have yet to sign up for the summit, do so asap at info@openforumeurope.org.

OFE was launched in 2002 to promote open source software. Like many Internet companies, Google benefits from open source - we use tens of millions of lines of open source code to run our products. We also give back: we are the largest open source contributor in the world, contributing over 800 projects that total over 20 million lines of code to open source.

The day before its summit, the OFE will return to its roots and host a Round Table on “Open Source Innovation in Business Models: Company and Community Integration.” Google open source guru Chris DiBona, who is responsible for our open source programmes will talk about the open source model, joined by George Greve, past President of Free Software Foundation Europe and now CEO at Kolab Systems. Maha Shaikh, senior researcher at the London School of Economics, will moderate.

The Round Table will take place on Wednesday 9 June between 8:00-10:00 AM at our Brussels premises at Chaussée d'Etterbeek 180, 1040 Brussels. Yes, that’s early, so we’ll provide a light breakfast. Some seats remain so if interested in attending, please sign up here.

Posted by Sebastian Müller, European Policy Manager

Europe Blog

The UK’s public data tsunami gathers speed

Unlocking our shared cultural heritage: Google partners with the Austrian National Library

Brussels debates Open Internet on 10 June

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