More on open data

The anonymous author of the peanutbutter blog has posted some notes on the 2nd International Digital Curation Conference Digital Data Curation in Practice (Glasgow, November 21-22, 2006).  Excerpt:

The open panel session on day two, engaged some interesting discussion and I heard a term which I had never heard before, Open Data, put forward by Peter Murray-Rust (University of Cambridge). We have all heard of Open Access publishing, (and should not be publishing any other way), but to date this means open access to the journal publication and not the the data that the publication refers to. In something as simple as a graph in a journal publication, generally the access to the numbers/values, has to be re-calculated via a print-out and a ruler. It would be so much easier (and logical) for re-use, analysis or even review, if the presented image was accompanied by the data (even if this was in an excel spreadsheet).