Open Data 2007 - Off to a Strong Start

The Open Data 2007 conference kicked off this evening at Reuters NY headquarters. Seth Goldstein offered a participative framework for how the group might best tackle the issues associated with attention on the Internet, followed by an opening keynote from Tom Glocer, Reuters CEO. Tom did a great job providing some perspective on how Reuters has used technology throughout its history to solve problems - problems that required out-of-the-box, leading edge, creative thinking to solve. And he sees the challenges in continuing to maintain this edge in an open data world.

Some of the issues that were raised by this interesting and eclectic crowd, which will serve as a launching point for tomorrow's more targeted discussions, include:

• The value of metadata, and how to bring this metadata to bear on the user experience;

• The use of collaboration to relate objects to one another, creating a grammar for a new kind of data structure;

• The issues of privacy and ownership of open data, and the need for "open commons" to be figured out;

• The value of an individual's data (low?) versus the aggregate data of many individuals (high?);

• The issue of proprietary data, and its relationship to the concept of open data;

• The value of attention data; there are some people whose attention data (i.e., their subscriptions and clickstream data) is of great interest to others - if those people provide this data for consumption by others, then subscribers all of a sudden become publishers;

• The boundaries of acceptability for sharing data; and

• The likely emergence of an "expert network" for attention data.

Many other interesting items were mentioned, but there were simply too many for this addled brain to retain. In any event, I am sure tomorrow will be a very interesting day. I'll write a note following the conference to give you my key take-aways.