Data Roundups contain news on new apps, libraries, and other tools for working with data; newly announced conferences, workshops, hackathons, MOOCs, etc. If you have a data news tip, send it to us at [email protected]. This week’s Data Roundup is brought to you by John Murtagh.

Tools, Courses, and Events

The Big Data in Biomedicine conference kicks off at Stanford today. The event, which will be held at the School of Medicine’s Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge, is bringing together leading figures from academia, industry, government and philanthropic foundations to discuss the burgeoning opportunities for mining the vast amounts of biomedical data housed in public databases. Here’s a look at the schedule. The event will be webcasted via the Big Data in Biomedicine website.

The next OKF Open Data Meetup is in Amsterdam http://bit.ly/17YCVDl  on May 30^th which is part of the wider community across the world. Spread the word & join!

The April workshop Open Data on the Web which was in London now has a list of all received papers now online. The main topics of the Workshop were discoverability; transformation (to other formats); combinations of data from different models (e.g. linked data and CSV); quality assessment and self-description; extracting human-readable “stories” from data.

The new Open Data Tourism Hack at home, part of the Open Cities project is offering prizes for the best app and best use of Open Data to help European cities find new ways to manage the big challenges, and improve their tourism.

The LinkedUp Project has 39.500 EUR in prize money for the LinkedUp Challenge; three consecutive competitions looking for interesting and innovative tools and applications that analyse and/or integrate open web data for educational purposes.

There is now an Open Data Stack Exchange site in public beta. It’s a question and answer site for developers and researchers interested in open data and is built and run by users as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. It’s working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about open data.

Data Stories

Our @iainh_z wrote a guest post on the state of #opendata in Medicine for the Open Knowledge Foundation (@OKFN) http://ow.ly/ld94q 

The @americangut project is a collective of research scientists interested in exploring global gut microbiota World’s LARGEST open-source, community driven effort (they’re asking for your poo) to characterize the microbial diversity of the Global Gut. It’s embraced openscience – open data, open software and analysis on GitHub.

On May 22, 2012 at the University of North Texas, a group of technologists and librarians, scholars and researchers, university administrators, and other stakeholders gathered to discuss and articulate best practices and emerging trends in research data management.  This Denton Declaration bridges the converging interests of these stakeholders and promotes collaboration, transparency, and accountability across organizational and disciplinary boundaries.

The Guardian’s Data Blog has done some analysis on the key points and recommendations of the Shakespeare review which looked at open government data in the UK. They also ask if his open data agenda is shrewd but stuck in the @guardian live discuss #OpenData agenda in practice guardian.co.uk/public-leaders… They’ve also done a piece on Rohan Silva. “…the man who turned David Cameron onto open data”.

@chris_whong has visualised NYC’s subway turnstiles for @NYCEDC http://chriswhong.com/open-data/visualizing-the-mtas-turnstile-data/ and reveals the hard work (finger clicking) that goes into it. To help, also from NY @NYStateCIO have just released open data sets that reveal the ‘Wineries, Breweries, and Distilleries Map’ for the state of New York.

Data Sources

IBM Smarter Cities ‏@IBMSmartCities26m is a comprehensive new mapping tool from LSE Cities, an urban studies project of the London School of Economics, makes the varying fortunes of Europe’s urban areas clear. Using Oxford Economics’ European Cities and Regional Forecasts database, the Metromonitor measures the employment and economic growth of 150 of the continent’s largest metro areas against metrics like national growth, population size, and urban typology.

The World Bank launched a much-improved version of its Open Data Catalog such as all essential information is available in a one-page list, sorted by name, popularity, or date. You can access bulk downloads, APIs or query tools from the same page with a single click. And you can see all the available metadata without having to visit separate pages on various sites.

The Government of South Australia has made its data freely available by releasing more than 100 datasets from 16 organisations, covering a range of topics including transportation, environment, education, crime and even baby names. Also from Down Under the Australian Archaeological Association has compiled a freely available set of Microsoft® Excel® databases listing radiocarbon, luminescence and uranium series ages from archaeological sites across Australia.

From academics at Stanford University a free 437-page book PDF entitled “Mining of Massive Datasets” has been made available for download (hardcopy published by Cambridge University Press).

A new service (ODIN) allows researchers to add their research datasets – and other content with DataCite DOIs, including all figshare content – to their ORCID profile by integrating with the DataCite Metadata Store. ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from each other).

Pan European datasets have been released via the ESPON Database Portal which supplies different users (researchers, policy makers and stakeholders at regional and local level) with data, indicators and tools that can be used for European territorial development and cohesion policy formulation, application and monitoring at different geographical levels. The data included in the ESPON Database is mainly coming from European institutions such as EUROSTAT and EEA, and from all ESPON projects.