• [Update] http://yourtopia.net we’ve renamed to YourTopia
• http://openhdi.org/ – stub website (it’s what we’ll make today and tomorrow!)
• http://okfnpad.org/openhdi – planning pad
• http://bitbucket.org/okfn/openhdi – source code and data

The idea is to look at ‘development beyond GDP’ by collecting weightings on particular aspects of ‘development’ (health, education, gdp, inequality) from users and using that to build our own human development index.

We first talked about this a few months ago at the open economics online meetup. Dirk Heine and Guo Xu then put together an excellent demo version: http://eutopia.guoxu.org/ and now we’re working to take that to the status of a full app!

Talks and Events

• Open Government Data Camp 18-19 Nov 2010 – Organized by myself and colleagues at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Over 300 participants from over 30 countries. More at http://opengovernmentdata.org/camp2010/
  • My introductory talk at OGD Camp
  • UK Government made a major announcement of renewed commitment to open data at a press conference co-hosted by OKF which coincided with the camp (UK PM video)
• Talks at Picnic 2010 (Amsterdam), dataconomy (London), Gov2.0 (Berlin), ONA 2010 (Washington) including detour to MIT (Media Lab and Sloan) and Harvard (Berkman and Bibliographic data folks).
• Workshop on Open Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain Workshop (Berlin Oct 2010)

Open Data Projects

• Milestone release of 3 million open bibliographic records from the British Library with this material on the web at http://bibliographica.org/ – native RDF bibliographic web application
  • The release was part of the JISC-funded OpenBib project — on which OKF is a partner and in which I am personally participating
• Where Does My Money Go? – data store
  • v2.0 release (screencast) – culmination of 6 months of work, project was a finalist for the BIMAs
  • Major attention around release of 25k spending in the UK (19th November)
  • Coded pure javascript WDMMG data store explorer (and contributed to lots of other parts of the codebase)
• CKAN (software), datapkg and Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN.net)
  • Major release of CKAN (v1.2)
  • Major datapkg release (v0.7) (my coding)
  • http://ckan.net/ reaches 1550 packages
• Open Data Manual – Open Data Manual sprint in Berlin (Oct 2010)
• Annotation Toolkit
• Open Shakespeare meetups

General

• Work on developing the German Chapter of the OKF
• Partcipation in meetings of the UK Public Sector Transparency Board
• Published working papers on the Size and Value of the Public Domain

• Explorer: http://rufuspollock.org/wdmmg/explorer.html
• Source: http://bitbucket.org/okfn/wdmmg-js/src/tip/src/explorer.html

Warning: won’t work in IE (atm due to lack of svg support) and works best (i.e. fastest) in Chrome!

I’d be interested in any feedback and any suggestions for experience with protovis or any other javascript libraries (I’ve also used flot and thejit a bit). In particular one thing a bit lacking currently in protovis is any animation (something that’s goodin thejit …).

Features:

• True ‘explorer’: you can choose any set of breakdown ‘keys’ to visualize
• Primary ‘financial bubbles’ view with interactive navigation into bubbles
  • Support for arbitrary depth of data ‘tree’ so you can keep navigating down (though currently limited by user interface to select at most 3 levels)
• Multiple other visualizations including treemap, sunburst, dendrogram and ‘icicle’
• Time support
• View the source data in table or as json

I’m sure there’s tons to improve especially on the usability (e.g. should default labels have amounts in them?) so if you take a look please let me know any feedback.

Some specific limitations:

• Does not work in IE — but hope to fix this using svg.js soon
• Colours and general ‘look’ could be improved — help wanted!
• Occasional bugs e.g. weird redraws — if you find one please let me know

I’ve termed this measure “significance” (with intentional quotes) as it co-mingles a variety of factors:

• Prolificness — how many distinct works an author produced (since usually each work will get an item)
• Popularity — this influences how many times the same work gets reissued as a new ‘item’ and the library decision to keep the item
• Merit — as for popularity

The following table shows the top 50 authors by “significance”. Some of the authors aren’t real people but entities such as “Great Britain. Parliament” and for our purposes can be ignored. What’s most striking to me is how closely the listing correlates with the standard literary canon. Other features of note:

• Shakespeare is number 1 (2)
• Classics (latin/greek) authors are well-represented with Cicero at number 2 (4), Horace at 5 (9) followed Homer, Euripides, Ovid, Plato, Aeschylus, Xenophon, Sophocles, Aristophanes and Euclid.
• Surprise entries (from a contemporary perspective): Hannah More, Oliver Goldsmith, Gilbert Burnet (perhaps accounted by his prolificity).
• Also surprising is limited entries from 19th century UK with only Scott (26), Dickens (28) and Byron (41)

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table class=”data”>RankNo. of ItemsName 13112Great Britain. Parliament. 21154Shakespeare, WilliamHere’s 31076Church of England. 4973Cicero, Marcus Tullius 5825Great Britain. 6766Catholic Church. 7721Erasmus, Desiderius 8654Defoe, Daniel 9620Horace 10599Aristotle 11547Voltaire 12539Virgil 13527Swift, Jonathan 14520Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von 15486Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 16479Homer 17444Milton, John 18388Sterne, Laurence 19387England and Wales. Sovereign (1660-1685 : Charles II) 20386Euripides 21372Ovid 22358Goldsmith, Oliver 23358Plato 24351Wang 25349Alighieri, Dante 26338Scott, Walter (Sir) 27326More, Hannah 28322Dickens, Charles 29315Aeschylus 30304Burnet, Gilbert 31302Luther, Martin 32295Dryden, John 33290Xenophon 34280Sophocles 35262Pope, Alexander 36259Fielding, Henry 37258Li 38250Calvin, Jean 39248Zhang 40247Aristophanes 41247Byron, George Gordon Byron (Baron) 42247Bacon, Francis 4324have 7Chen 44245Terence 45241Euclid 46235Augustine (Saint, Bishop of Hippo.) 47232Burke, Edmund 48223Johnson, Samuel 49222Bunyan, John 50222De la Mare, Walter

Top 50 authors based on CUL Catalogue 1400-1960

The other thing we could look at is the overall distribution of titles per author (and how it varies with rank — a classic “is it a power law” question). Below are the histogram (NB log scale for counts) together with a plot of rank against count (which equates, v. crudely, to a transposed plot of the tail of the histogram …). In both cases it looks (!) like a power-law is a reasonable fit given the (approximate) linearity but this should be backed up with a proper K-S test.

Histogram of items-per-author distribution (log-log)

Rank versus no. of items (log-log)

TODO

• K-S tests
• Extend data to present day
• Check against other catalogue data
• Look at occurrence of people in title names
• Look at when items appear over time

Colophon

Code to generate table and graphs in the open Public Domain Works repository, specifically method ‘person_work_and_item_counts’ in this file: http://knowledgeforge.net/pdw/hg/file/tip/contrib/stats.py