Progress: data.gov.uk

Source: Paul Miller, Cloud of Data

Podcast: Paul Miller’s conversation with Richard Stirling: Drivers, Transparency, Licensing, Local Government and Applications Gallery

East Yorkshire, UK: 16 July 2010

Paul Miller has published a podcast of his interview with Richard Stirling of the UK Government’s Cabinet Office, the Government department responsible for the development of data.gov.uk. The conversation is about progress with the Government’s ambitious data.gov.uk site. The podcast was recorded on the 16th July 2010 and is approximately 35 minutes.

In the introduction, Paul notes some related podcasts dating back to the planning stage of data.gov.uk.

“I spoke with John Sheridan of the Government’s Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) back in July of 2009, when this programme was just taking shape. More recently, Talis‘ Richard Wallis recorded a podcast with Richard as data.gov.uk formally launched earlier this year, and his colleague Zach Beauvais followed up with a videocast to explore some uses for the data.”

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This following select review of the questions posed by Paul and Richard’s responses suggest a very stimulating and informative conversation helping to understand the principles behind the data.gov.uk initiative and reflecting the open development spirit adopted and accomplishments.

  • The podcast of the interview and full discussion is online.

Paul Miller Questions: What is the point of data.gov.uk and why is the UK Government putting resources into it given the current economic situation rather than something else? What is the Government driver?

Response and Discussion:

The UK Government is committed to the principles of transparency and accountability and wants to open up its non personal information. This approach was adopted for three principle reasons.

  1. We work for the British people and it is important to give access to information and have already published lists of challenging and informative data including civil servant salaries over £50,000 and where public money is spent.
  2. Enabling other people to help build better public services along the style of the My Society web innovation
  3. Support commercial innovation and economic growth

The Ordnance Survey data was discussed which was previously expensive and now some of it is freely available to build new services and the OS data is fantastic data and innovative work is being done to open up its data. The point is discussed how more revenue comes from the tax revenues from new services or products using OS open data than the previous practice of charging for the data.

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Paul Miller Questions: Most work has been at central government – how does it extend to local government at the community level and assorted non departmental bodies? But, most work has been done at the central government and big government departments. How do people come on board?

Response and Discussion:

Work is underway under by the local data panel and the transparency board looking at the whole of the public sector to bring the levels of government together.

There is interest at the local level and growing number local authorities opening up their data and they are licensing it under the data.gov.uk licences.

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Paul Miller Questions: Licences are crucial – what is the current situation? What does the licence permit and how is it different from before? Why isn’t the Creative Commons attribution licence used?

Response and Discussion:

The National Archives has been looking at licensing over the past 12 months with a view to determining: what are the simplest licences that enable re-use? It is possible have lots of data but without appropriate licences or restrictive licences no one will want to or be able to use it. They have been looking for something that preserves the attribution on the data among select other factors.

What is being tested (beta) on data.gov.uk is something similar to a Creative Commons attribution licence allows for free re-use of the data for commercial and non commercial use. The goal is to make re-use by civil society or business as easy as possible without allowing the data to be changed and to require acknowledgement of the source.

There are technical and complex reasons for why the Creative Commons attribution licence isn’t used all interrelated with Crown Copyright (England, Scotland and Wales) and database rights. Some Creative Commons licence options were deemed to be inappropriate because they granting the data for the public domain.

Treasury Data (Coins data) was released in a bold step and it includes significant information about financial transactions by the Government. Within 24 hours approximately the Guardian and the Open Knowledge Foundation had put this data in a format on open source products to make it more easily re-used by the end users. The raw data was released even though it wasn’t in a perfect format. Every data set on data.gov.uk has a wiki page where users can feed into and share their insights about using the data. Data.gov.uk plans to put effort into providing explanations on the web front end about the data when there is a lot of interest in the data. But generally the approach will be to showcase what has been done by the community, if available.

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Paul Miller Questions: If I’m a developer, how do I get involved?

Response and Discussion:

Go to the site data.gov.uk and use it. There is even an option to select a random dataset, if inspiration is needed. The suggestion is do something amazing and creative and then share it on the site. Use the site to suggest what could be done differently or improved. The advice is for others to take the data – do things with it and share it on the applications gallery on data.gov.uk

The following resources were referred to during the conversation

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