A big step in the right direction
The news flew around twitter on Tuesday night that Gordon Brown was announcing the opening up of a raft of data lists for use by everyone, whether for commercial purposes or otherwise. When the dust settled it was revealed that this was in fact the opening of a consultation on a plan to do this.
At this point, and because this is still being consulted upon there isn't a clear picture as to exactly what will be involved, it looks like the one of the most important things included will be Ordnance Survey maps down to a scale of 1:10,000. More traffic and transport data available and licensed in a way that will allow for better 3rd party journey planning applications; ending the strangle hold transport companies have on the timetable. Additional data sets around subjects like house prices, numbers of offenses, recycling totals, healthcare provision and other local data will hopefully become available to power hyperlocal information sites[1]. Finally as Free our Bills has been campaigning for, legislation is mooted as one area that will be moved to being published in an open structured way.
There is still a lot of detail missing, firstly is this all of this data going to be directly added to data.gov.uk (the current governmental data site under beta testing) or will, for example, the Ordnance Survey run a separate online mapping system. What licence(s) will the data be released under and will this solve problems like the Ordnance Survey currently stopping people from overlaying data they lay claim to onto google maps?
If at the end of the consultation this goes ahead, and as there are MPs making positive noises about it from both sides of the house there is cautious optimism that it will, it will mean that the barrier of entry for producing useful websites and mobile applications will be much lower. "Show me a good local restaurant" applications will have access to food hygiene ratings. Ticket booking applications can tell you what time the last bus home after the gig is. Local councils will find it easier and cheaper to produce tailored mapping of services and so on and so forth. There is already a trend in individuals and small groups providing applications, a constituency too small for the big boys to worry about, and with more data available this should only help this movement.
For more information:
[1]see the postcode newspaper project for a good example of local use of such data.
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Tony Kennick's blog posts
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