Open Tea at CIS-VU

Open Tea at CISToday, the fourth floor of the VU metropolitan building was the scene of the Open Tea, a series of events organised by the Open for Change network. Open for Change organises such an event, open to everyone interested in Open Development a couple of times a year somewhere in the Netherlands.

After meeting members at the OKFest in Helsinki, we proposed to hold an Open Tea event at VU University. Specifically, the Centre for International Cooperation (CIS-VU) was kind enough to host the event.

We got to talk about the API2LOD for Development data. API2LOD is a tool that is under development by Christophe Guéret and myself that allows the creation of a wrapper that exposes any data from any API into five-star linked data. Our first two datasets are related to development: the data from the knowledge base of the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) and data from the International Aid Transparancy Initiative (IATI). Through our efforts, we hope to bring more data on development to the Web of Linked Data.

The second VU talk was about the efforts of the W4RA team to bring the Web to people in rural developent areas using voice services. In particular RadioMarché and Foroba Blon.

Pelle Aardema and Rolf Kleef then gave us an update on the status of Open for Change and plans for the future. I am sure that VU Amsterdam’s  Network Institute and CIS-VU can benefit greatly from continuing this collaboration and we hope that we can add our knowledge and experience to the network.

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