Matt Biddulph kindly agreed to give an Aula Talk while he’s visiting Helsinki this coming week.

The talk is on the Open Data Movement and it will take place on Thursday, August 17th, 18:00 at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT). HIIT is located on the 6th floor in the Pinta-building at High Tech Center (HTC) in Ruoholahti. The address is Tammasaarenkatu 3, Helsinki.

Here’s a leader to the talk:

The Wikipedia is only the tip of the iceberg of information that is becoming freely accessible on the internet. Following the success of open source, an open data movement is occurring online that seeks to gather, publish and enable the reuse of rich machine-readable datasets – like all programs ever broadcasted by the BBC.

By opening up these wellsprings of information, which were previously only accessible to large institutions, the open data movement has unleashed a new wave of creativity on the Web. Programmers, students, and companies are building mashups by overlaying photos, blog posts, and other objects to open datasets like the BBC Programme Catalogue, Wikipedia, Open Streetmap, and Thinglink.

As a case in point, Biddulph will describe how the BBC’s database of programming from the 1920s to the present day was transformed from an internal green-screen application to a public Web 2.0 service using Ruby on Rails.

Expect to see some playful examples of what you can do with the BBC Programme Catalogue, Thinglink, and other open datasets.

Big thanks to Ulla for organizing this.