Category: Blog

I spent the beginning of a very busy week last week talking about the benefits of making public sector data more accessible. I was speaking at the launch of public transit data in Brussels, where the local public transport agency STIB made their schedule information available for use within Google Maps in Belgium.

As in all previous Transit data launches this is a non-exclusive arrangement, and others organisations or individuals could make use of the data to build applications.. This is one of main drivers of making information like this available, as it allows innovative solutions to be developed rapidly to meet real user needs.

The most well developed ecosystem of applications developers around transit data has developed around the BART System in San Francisco, who have a web page listing around 30 free and paid for applications which help people use public transport in the Bay Area.

At last weeks launch in Brussels, a local developer eMich demonstrated their android application which provides access to real time information on the STIB system, clear evidence that Europe’s developer community are just a proficient  at meeting users needs given access to the data.

In the UK the government has made some excellent progress in both providing the mechanism to download government data sets, but also working hard to develop a community of developers and innovators around www.data.gov.uk.

Now just a few weeks after the site went live we are beginning to see applications developed that exploit the data, a personal favourite of mine is the asborometer, a mobile application that allows a user to understand local crime data in a very simple way..

Listen to the developer Jeff Gilfelt describe his project..

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

So be honest how many of us every expected todays’s announcement would ever come?  a day when the very conservative civil service of the United Kingdom made available very comprehensive government data sets available for free.  OK there are a few notable exceptions (OS , Royal Mail and TfL spring to mind) but as a starting point to have nearly  2500 data sets available and a community of nearly the same number of application developers is a huge success.

How often is it that the UK government can demonstrate greater openness that the United States, this is a far more impressive launch than the much admired data.gov portal.

The data.gov.uk portal also represents a huge shift in mindset for government in the UK, I’m very proud of a letter which I received while working at the Ordnance Survey almost accusing me of sedition and threatening me with the official secrets act for blogging and suggesting the OS could make data more widely accessible.

Culture change is a term much branded about within the civil service, what we see with the data portal really is culture change.

From a technical perspective data.gov.uk also represents the publish first and sort out the quality / metadata later paradigm which governments must follow, an evolutionary approach is vital in the fast moving world of web today, achieving perfection and accounting for all potential uses of data is not feasible and can no longer be used as an excuse not release data “as is”

The role of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt in this change cannot be over stated without the “star” factor of these two individuals todays announcement would not have been possible. I look forward to reading the inside story of their activities in the next edition of  Prospect Magazine which promises to be a major scoop.

Also influential with government has been the campaigning of  former innovation minister Tom Watson among others, has been edging towards this move by holding such events as Show Us a Better Way, a competition with cash prizes for government data mashups.

Today of course is not the end of the battle, we need to keep the pressure on for all public sector data holders to default to making their information available, and there is still time to express support for free access to Ordnance Survey data by taking part in the current consultation process. Evidence for why this is important is illustrated by this example, just one of many issues caused by the current licensing regime.

To paraphrase outrageously, for Open Access to Government data, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, Copenhagen (55.683N, 12.571E)

Over the next week or so the media will be full of stories from Copenhagen as the world’s leader fly into the city for United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP-15. There will no doubt be limited progress towards agreeing to reduce greenhouse gases emissions globally, getting international governments to agree on anything is difficult, and to agree on making such potentially major changes to their economies is difficult despite the dire consequences of doing nothing.

The debate is not helped by lingering doubts among many people that climate change itself is no more than a liberal conspiracy or at least there is little evidence to support that mankind and increased CO2 emissions are actually responsible for the changes.

Of both sides of the arguments there are powerful interest bodies, who are actively working on providing their interpretations to the evidence without necessarily being fair and open minded, even respected academics it appears have felt it necessary to manipulate information to fit their world view.

Ultimately if we are to get politicians to act with conviction on this matter, they need to believe it is something for which there will be a domestic political cost for not doing so, and this only results from the issue becoming something that the mainstream population has a firmly held opinion of.

Unfortunately people have lost confidence is both politicians and I’m afraid scientists to provide unbiased analysis of data on Climate Change, perhaps we now need to better educate people as to how to look at climate change data themselves  and to make this data available without spin or interpretation so that people can make their own minds up.

Last week I visited the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy and meet with some scientists who are analysing greenhouse gas emission data over the last 25 years. The EDGAR project latest analysis is to try provide a granular map of the distribution of greenhouse gas emissions which they have visualised using Google Earth.

This is no doubt a powerful image, and an interesting talking point to the debate, but it is also the results of a model, a manipulation of raw data to paint a picture.

There is of course nothing wrong with this, as it makes a particular point, and because in this case the  raw data behind the analysis as well as the well documented model are also easily accessible for bedroom scientists to analyse themselves.

And before any climate scientists out there claim that this is ridiculous and that the general public cannot be expected to deal with such complex tools and concepts, ask a surveyor or cartographer if they expected that the general public would be building the only detailed global digital maps a few years ago ?

Written and submitted from my home (51.425N, 0.331W)