Today, data is abundant, but for the most part, unusable. Seventy percent of a data scientist’s job is just cleansing data. The modern software architecture encourages data to be hoarded only accessible through proprietary APIs. And, even with proprietary APIs the market for data integrations is expected to grow to a trillion dollars by the end of the decade. When humanity is spending the GDP of Indonesia just so that the data in System X can work with the data in System Y, the field of software engineering has failed us. So much data - data that could be used by new startups and nonprofits that couldn’t exist today - goes unused because it’s so difficult to access.

Big tech has benefited from an educational dynamic that consistently underfunds public education but demands increased technology to prepare the workers of the future, providing low-cost solutions in exchange for data and the potential for future product loyalty

The US Library of Congress has been designated the official registration authority by the ISO and they publish the entire, official, up-to-date list as a trivial to parse text file for free.

Because ISO code lists were not always free and because they change over time, a key idea was to create a permanent, stable registry for all of the subtags valid in a language tag.

The repository also contains the datasets used in our experiments, in JSON format. These are in the data folder.

What this means is: I better refrain from writing a new book and we rather focus on more and better docs.

The ultimate goal of the Open Library is to make all the published works of humankind available to everyone in the world. While large in scope and ambition, this goal is within our grasp.

User subjects and data objects are treated as programmable matter, which is to say extractable matter.