UK government moves to put more data online for free. Ordnance Survey maps to go free online |
PM to open access to 2,000 data sets in victory for Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign |
The government is to explore ways of making all Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April, in a victory for the Guardian’s three-year Free Our Data campaign. The move will bring the UK into line with the free publication of maps that exists in the US. |
In the new year Brown intends to publish 2,000 sets of data, possibly including all legislation, as well as road-traffic counts over the past eight years, property prices listed with the stamp-duty yield, motoring offences with types of offence and the numbers, by county, for the top six offences. |
It is thought transport providers, such as train, tube and bus companies, will lose the right to demand a hefty fee from companies such as independent travel websites and firms devising programs for mobile phones, who want to publish such information. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk |
The Australian government has had great success with a coding event for government data. Aussies unleash data flood
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To help spark interest in the competition, the Government 2.0 Taskforce brought an army of 150 geeks together in Canberra over the weekend for a coding marathon called Govhack. |
Participants formed teams to develop and demonstrate their applications and, at the end of the event, a panel decided that the best mashup was LobbyClue, which combines data from the lobbyist register, contract notices, business names and other information to produce visual representations of relationships between government organisations and businesses. |
Publishing Open Government Data |
W3C Working Draft 8 September 2009 |
Abstract
Every day, governments and government agencies publish more data on the
Internet. Sharing this data enables greater transparency; delivers more
efficient public services; and encourages greater public and commercial use and
re-use of government information. Some governments have even created catalogs
or portals (such as data.gov) to make it easy
for the public to find and use this data.
Although the reasons may vary, the logistics and practicalities of opening
government data are the same. To help governments open and share their data,
the W3C eGov Interest Group has developed the following guidelines. These
straightforward steps emphasize standards and methodologies to encourage
publication of government data, allowing the public to use this data in new and
innovative ways.
Read more at www.w3.org |
There appears to be growing consensus that GIS data is one of the cornerstones for Gov 2.0 Gov 2.0 Summit: GIS the Big Winner in Push for Open Government (analysis) |
The math is simple. According to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s Federal Enterprise Architecture framework, 74 percent of government data is location based. At the state and local level, the number is even higher: 80 percent, according to several organizations and publications. Read more at www.govtech.com |
DataMasher: Get Freakonomic On Government Data |
| f you’re a lobbyist / advocate, conspiracy theorist or Freakonomics fan, then you’ll love DataMasher. The map-based mash up site just took the Sunlight Foundation’s $10,000 grand prize in theApps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge. DataMasher offers users with no programming experience a chance to compare government data sets on a state-by-state basis. The tool is just one of the 3rd party mash ups using Data.gov’s federal government information. Read more at www.readwriteweb.com |
Kundra to agencies: Get ready for data deluge |
Agencies need to prepare for an explosion of new data over the next five years that will be created partly because of emerging Web 2.0 technologies, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, told a conference in Washington..
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“This notion of thinking about data in a structured, relational database is dead,” Kundra said July 21 at the Open Government and Innovations Conference. “Some of the most valuable information is going to live in video, blogs and audio, and it is going to be unstructured inherently.”
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Electronic health records, for example, will transform the way people get health care and will generate new and varying pieces of data, Kundra said. “If you look at an iPhone and the ability to go out there and take a picture or video that is GPS coded, and upload it in real time has fundamentally changed the notion of the relationship between technology and us,” he said.
Read more at fcw.com |
Anticipated Web 3.0 jibes with open-government goals |
Almost every morsel of government data exists in electronic form somewhere, and with the exception of classified data, it is perfectly acceptable for public consumption. However, making it easy for people to find, analyze, share and ultimately understand the information is another story. |
Many tech experts say the solution lies in the Semantic Web, a slowly emerging set of technologies that aim to improve access to and the usability of information and software services on the Internet, ushering in a new era of Internet applications that some are already calling Web 3.0. Read more at fcw.com |
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UK maps to go free online
