Chris Taggart is a founder of OpenlyLocal and OpenCorporates. He says “When people ask what I do I say I open up data, sometimes whether people like it or not.” In the beginning he didn’t really expect much to come of his first scrapers “other than maybe being told off by the councils, because all […]
Constructing the Open Data Landscape
In an article in today’s Telegraph regarding Francis Maude’s Public Data Corporation, Michael Cross asks: “What makes the state think it can be at the cutting edge of the knowledge economy“. He writes in terms of market and business share, giving the example of the satnav market worth over $100bn a year yet it’s based […]
Meet the User – Pall Hilmarsson
Our digger has been driving around colder climes by one of our star users. Icelander Pall Hilmarrson. Driving such a heavy vehicle on icy surfaces and through volcanic ash may seem daunting to most people, but Pall has not only ventured forth undeterred, he has given passers-by a lift. One such hitch-hiker is Chris Taggart with his […]
OpenCorporates partners with ScraperWiki & offers bounties for open data scrapers
This is a guest post by Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates When we started OpenCorporates it was to solve a real need that we and a number of other people in the open data community had: whether it’s Government spending, subsidy info or court cases, we needed a database of corporate entities to match against, and […]