Neelie Kroes: Data is the new gold!

admin — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:00:12 +0000

On December, 12 2011 Neelie Kroes (Vice-President of the European Commission) gave a speech about the Open Data Strategy of the EU. I’m not going to repeat the whole speech, you can read a transcript here but I must say that I heard a lot of encouraging statements in it!

Bronze

In the speech Neelie mentions the Open Data portals of the UK, Denmark and France – who last week opened data.gouv.fr – as heroes in Open Data work. And indeed they are heroes! But if we take a look at Tim Berner’s Lee suggested 5 star scheme for Linked Open Data we see that most of the Open Government Data portals currently available on the web only reach the second star. I would give them the bronze medal but why won’t we go for gold?

Gold

Well that’s precisely where The DataTank comes in to help. We see the 5 star scheme as a step-by-step process and The DataTank as the tool that can assist you to reach the fifth star.

Get Started

In our Get Started section you can see how we open up proprietary data formats (excel and shape files) from data.gov.uk and dati.gov.it into a RESTful API which returns Open Standards such as JSON, XML and RDF:

Now it’s your turn!

Why not give it a try for yourself? Install a datatank instance and open up some data from Open Government Data portals in Europe:

Homepage post

admin — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 01:00:47 +0000

A star is born!

Today, December 5th 2011, we are releasing the first version of The DataTank as a birthday present for one of our team members. We baptized this first release the ‘Developer’ release as it is all about API’s. On top of this first release we will be building new projects which are targetting end users.