Roelof Temmingh has written a cool new application which provides individuals with the ability to do data mining of publicly available information. It's a cross-platform Java application called Evolution, currently in its second beta, and available as a free download.

Business intelligence tools are typically used to design and generate reports from a wide range of data sources. There are a number of different types of business intelligence software. These include reporting and querying software, digital dashboards, process and data mining, business performance management, and spreadsheets.

Strip mining of open source can be interpreted as the appropriation of free software code for proprietary gain with no intention of feeding code changes back to the community. Open source software developers beware...

"The web2.0 era has put the web application frameworks at the center of the free software community attention. Various opinions (1,2) and performance (1,2) comparisons have been published by free software enthusiasts trying to rank the quality and the potential of different web frameworks.

A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations...

Mining the logs from the famous DistroWatch.com website enables to formally assess the trends in the GNU/Linux ecosystem. In particular, this first part analyzes the popularity of Ubuntu with respect to the former predominance of Mandriva.

A plotting tool is computer software which helps to analyze and visualize data, often of a scientific nature. Using this type of software, users can generate plots of functions, data and data fits. Software of this nature typically includes additional functionality, such as data analysis functions including curve fitting.

Data Visualization is a free cross data base and cross platform reporting tool. Its target is very simple: whatever operating system you use, whatever data base you keep data in and whatever report you want to have, you can create it for free in few a minutes using simple GUI.

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.