Open Data Round Up: 28/11/13

The biggest news this week here at Horizon has been the announcement of funding for a new Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training! The new CDT will focus on the theme of “My Life in Data” and will train a community of 80 future leaders to develop the technologies and applications of our ‘digital identities’ in a way that ensures their transparent use across the economy and wider society. The Centre brings together leading figures from computing and engineering as well as the social sciences, business and humanities, and is co-funded by over twenty industry, third sector and international partners.

• Nominet Trust have published a state-of-the-art review looking at Big Data and Social Organisations. The review says that if social organisations can realise the potential of Big Data then new practices and interventions that offer radically different approaches to addressing some of the most persistent social challenges can be created.

• The BBC signed Memorandums of Understanding supporting free and open internet technologies with The Open Data Institute, The Open Knowledge Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation and The Europeana Foundation. These agreements will enable closer collaboration between the BBC and each of the four organisations on a range of mutual interests, including the release of structured open data and the use of open standards in web development.

• The Public Administration Select Committee have published written and oral evidence received by their recent enquiry into Statistics and Open Data. Evidence was given by a wide range of people including Rufus Pollock of OKFN and Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt of The ODI. The findings of the enquiry will be published in 2014.

• Horizon partners Nottingham City Council have launched a new version of Open Data Nottingham which is the portal for all of Nottingham City’s open data. The site contains over 80 data sets, all released under an Open Government Licence, and new content is added regularly but data users are invited to get in touch if a data set they wish to access is unavailable.

That’s all for this week! However if you are interested in the new Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training or in Open Data Nottingham please get in touch via the comments or on Twitter!