Day 1 at EuroOSCON 2006 was a packed day. So many people and so many different notions of ‘open’. Here is a run-down of talks I attended, ranging from microformats (an answer to ‘data inside’?) to neogeography.

Microformats: Web of Data was an interesting talk about Microformats—introducing the concepts and some software behind using microformats. Brian Suda, the author, has made the slides and other resources available.

In Tim’s keynote he spoke about the “Data Inside” as being a problem. Perhaps microformats are one form of solution. Instead of putting the data inside anything, let’s leave it on our own sites and mark it up so that it can be recognized as data.

Cool Tools for Geographic Applications was an interesting talk given by Schuyler Erle. His enthusiasm for maps rubs off. After introducing the word neogeographer to my vocabulary, Schuyler talked about the OpenLayers project at MetaCarta, and his www.gutenkarte.org/. What they’ve done here is geocode all place names within a few books from Project Gutenberg, which then gives you a map of the places in the book. They also provide (or hope to) an API for doing the same yourself.

Open Data AWOL, a keynote by Steve Coast, reinforced the idea about the data becoming critical in control and Steve urged for a movement demanding open data. Some of the work he is doing includes OpenStreetMap.org. This project essentially allows anyone to upload GPS data that they may gather while traveling to work for example, or going on holiday. Using this data they can build a map of the streets of the world.

It’s a great project, and of course the more of us that contribute the better it will become.

Journalism via Computer Programming by Adrian Holovaty was a fascinating keynote looking at the new role journalists can play in this connected world. A key point he made is how journalists take facts (say at a crime scene) and then munge it into an ugly (albeit literally appealing) mass of human readable text that makes it difficult to subsequently extract those facts. How can we get those journalists to start thinking about collecting those data?

Here’s a stab: how about getting journalists to use a microformat?

Apache Harmony : Open Source Java SE by Geir Magnusson provided a great history of the Java virtual machine, and the current state of Apache Harmony - an open source implementation of the JVM and its base classes. I was astounded to hear that the latest builds can already run things like Eclipse and Tomcat. Geir explained the interested architecture the project is using in the construction of the virtual machine as well as the interesting challenges of licensing and intellectual property. The source code for many of the class libraries may have already been viewed by potential contributors to the project (because Sun distributed them), so how do you construct an open source project that needs to construct the same functionality with the same APIS while ensuring that Sun’s rights remain protected.

All in all, it was a day packed with stimulating information. I’m ready for the next.

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