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126 work, developing various open knowledge projects and tools for open knowledge.

We have created the Open Knowledge Definition to provide a clear set of conditions for openness in relation to knowledge. This provides a common thread to material that is made available under different liberal licenses (such as Creative Commons Attribution and Attribution Sharealike, the GNU Free Documentation License, etc), material in which rights have been waivered (CC Zero, the Public Domain Declaration License, etc), material that is in the public domain, and so on. Our “open knowledge” and “open data” web buttons are intended to publicize “openness” regardless of the legal basis of this. We have also drafted an Open Service Definition to fulfil the same function in relation to Software as a Service (SaaS). We aim to act as a hub and partner for the community of users and producers of open knowledge—facilitating discussion through our mailing lists, forums and annual conferences.

We produce material on legal, economic, and domain-specific issues relevant to open knowledge in the UK, EU and internationally. We help to initiate and maintain specific open knowledge projects:


 * Open Shakespeare is a complete collection of Shakespeare’s works with ancillary information, a concordance and an annotation tool;
 * Open Economics is a data store for economic data, plus a visualisation tool;
 * Open Text Book is a registry of textbooks that are fully open;
 * Public Domain Works is a registry of artistic works that are in the public domain—it merged with the Open Library;

Our KForge project is an open source system for managing software and knowledge projects—integrating tools such as a versioned storage system, a wiki, a tracker and a blog with the system’s own facilities for projects, users and permissions. We also run a free service called KnowledgeForge which runs on the Kforge software and currently houses a variety of open knowledge projects, from British parliamentary