Categories
Data Policy Thoughts

Whitehall and laptops..

An interesting news story from silicon.com, noting that government staff are to be banned from removing laptops containing personal information from their offices.

Is it just me, but should we not be asking why they have such data on their laptops in the first place ? Surely all such information should be held only in databases on the government secure network, where they use can be monitored and protected.. if this needs to be accessed from home or on the road then VPN into the network ?

For too long this has been reported as Government being careless losing laptops, the real story is a complete lack of information management. If this type of debate gets your interest, take a look a Cory Doctorow’s article in the Guardian last week.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Data Policy Ordnance Survey web 2.0

Zillow move should allow other small scale experiments

Last weeks announcement on the Zillow blog that is was releasing its neighbourhood boundary data to the community in Shapefile format is the story of the year so far… (ok so we are only a few weeks in… but this is important)

Zillow.com

Zillow is the US Real Estate web site that uses much web 2.0 goodness to actually carry out simple analysis of the housing market, a largely geographical phenomena of course, and allows the user to produce simple hotspot maps of the relative activities in house prices in different neighbourhoods, amongst other things.

This is where the Open Source boundary data comes in… the best people to help define and keep the neighbour boundary data “up to date” are the people themselves, and as the OpenStreetMap guys have found there is a growing community of people willing to do so.

I would be really interested to see how peoples perception of their neighbourhood compares with the “official” data, there is of course much folk-law as to the practices of Estates Agents in London calling Battersea an a rough area when I grew up “South Chelsea”, of course it is gentrified now…

We are only just developing the tools which allow users to express their own sense of place, this is an exciting first step in many ways, and will no doubt point the way to more collaborative mapping applications.

Again ,of course, this raises the question as to other data sets which could be maintained by the community in such a manner, the completeness of OpenStreetMap in the UK (shields up) could be improved overnight if data could be open sourced in this way as it has in the Netherlands for example.

The OS spends relatively little keeping its small scale business geographics data products such as strategi maintained, and it returns similarly modest revenues… worth a small-scale experiment perhaps ?

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Apple

Genius MacWorld Keynote in a minute…

Credit to the Mahalo daily, no great surprises and nothing for me to run out and buy.. although I’m looking forward to the free firmware update for my Apple TV !

I got four on my keynote bingo game however !

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.