Category Archives: information

Webinar: Data derived from Traditional Knowledge and Cybercartography

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On Wednesday, 11th of December, Tracey P. Lauriault, a post doctoral researcher on the Programmable City Project led a webinar with the Canadian Federal Government GeoConnections program on the topic of legal issues with traditional knowledge and cybercartography in the Canada’s North.

The webinar discussed the results of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Funded Partnership Development Grant entitled Mapping the Legal and Policy Boundaries of Digital Cartography led by Dr. R. Fraser Taylor of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC), Carleton University, and Dr. Teresa Scassa of the Faculty of Law, Centre of Law, Technology and Culture (CLTS) at the University of Ottawa, including the Canadian Internet Public Policy Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) and GeoConnections.

The issues presented were:

· Traditional Knowledge (TK) and cybercartography;
· The complexities of Intellectual Property rights and TK;
· Challenges and possible solutions with regard to Western law and TK;
· The role of collaborative relationships in cybercartography in the North.

While this work was not part of the Programmable City Project, it does demonstrate the nuanced issues related to the production of data, in this case the uneasy relationship between the protection of traditional knowledge and western concepts of law, especially intellectual property law which protects creative works produced by individuals while traditional knowledge grounded in communities that are collectively owned cannot benefit from these protections.

A French version of the Webinar will be presented by Lauriault on Friday, Dec. 13.

Smart Cities, Big Data & Their Consequences

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Rob Kitchin is presenting an invited talk today at the 3rd National Smart Cities Summit in Croke Park.  His talk is entitled ‘Smart cities, big data and their consequences’.  It is an updated version of his paper ‘The Real Time City: Big Data and Smart Urbanism‘, with two new sections (the politics of big urban data’ and ‘buggy, brittle and hackable cities’).  A full written version of the paper can be found here.  And here are the slides:

Open Data Jurisdictions & Initiatives in Ireland

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Dominic Byrne, of Fingal County Council, in his presentation at last week’s open data seminar pointed to these open data initiatives.  Fingal Open Data was the first to do so.

Additionally, there are some open data civil society initiatives such as:

And an academic / private sector / government partnership portal:

As part of this activity, the government announced at the Open Government Partnership this month that it will soon launch a national open data portal as part of its open government strategy.

There are also other data sharing / data access initiatives ongoing in Ireland, and to name a few:

And also some research projects are examining this topic. Here are a couple:

This is not a comprehensive list, but it is a start, and as research progresses, I will make more resources available.  If you hear or know of more, do not hesitate to let us know!