Free/Open Source software is great for Public Administrations, but Free/Open data are even more important. Making public sector information really accessible, that is publishing online raw data in open formats and under open licenses, can both improve transparency in government and foster local economical and cultural activities.

The next Open Data Day will be Saturday, February 23, 2013. We are more keen than ever to have this not just be about hacking code, but reusing other projects and broadening the community by using data to do all sorts of things from analysis to visualizations and even just sharing an interesting insight.

The open-source project shadowing Silverlight has come a step closer to mirroring the latest edition of Microsoft's challenger to Flash. Moonlight leader Miguel de Icaza said a preview of Moonlight 3.0 has been delivered for early testing.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) has completed the bulk import of comprehensive street and highway data for the United States, months ahead of the project's original estimates. The massive data set originated with the US Census Bureau's public domain map database, and importing it required a dedicated upload process running around the clock since August 2007. The imported data will still require human editing and error-correction, but the completed task is a major milestone for the OSM project.

"There is an immense number of virtualization improvements and features in this release," Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields told InternetNews.com. "These things will affect anyone using virtualization across the board." Virtualization has been a big push this year for Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT).

Look, those nice people at Microsoft Research are saving science from its data deluge-> Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench allows scientists to easily work with large volumes of data. Basically Project Trident is more Project Trojan Horse.

Google unveils the open-source Blog Converters project for federating the exchange of data between blogging platforms, including Blogger, MoveableType, WordPress and LiveJournal. Blog Converters is just one facet of a fundamental shift from siloed Web sites, which lock users in to their services, to a more boundless Web, where users can liberally migrate their data from one Web site to the next.

Google is unlocking its data door by launching a new initiative called Data Liberation, an approach to engineering that allows users to move their data - be it pictures, mail or documents - from Google’s servers to any other location.

"...In all this Semantic Web news, though, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The benefit of the Semantic Web is that data may be re-used in ways unexpected by the original publisher. That is the value added.