UK Launches Open Data Site; Puts Data.gov to Shame
A new website dedicated to making non-personal data held by the U.K. government available for software developers has launched today with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Data.gov.uk is being slammed with traffic but six months after the U.S. government opened its Data.gov site the U.K. site already has more than three times as much data than the U.S. site offers today.
At launch, Data.gov.uk has nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. The U.S. site, Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets today.
The UK government has been a big supporter of innovation built on top of public data. It sponsored a contest called Show Us a Better Way, giving cash prizes to people who came up with the best ideas for mashups they would like to create if they had access to the right government data. Charles Arthur at the Guardian has good coverage of the U.K.'s open data work (the Guardian has been working hard to open public data as well).
The U.S. government, on the other hand, has been lackluster in its move to open data to facilitate outside innovation. If Twitter is the poster child for building a thriving ecosystem around a streaming set of data, then the Obama administration has earned about 140 characters worth of praise for its fledgling efforts so far. The U.S. government's efforts to advance agencies' use of cloud computing may work in conjunction with opening data to the public and thus may improve the state of things, but time will tell.
Congress didn't even ask U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra any questions about President Obama's Open Government initiative during his confirmation hearings. When the U.S. government's Data.gov site launched, critics pointed out that it was filled with relatively non-controversial data sets; plenty of USGS data but no DOJ or military data, for example. The U.K.'s data site, in contrast, includes 22 military data sets at launch, including one called Suicide and Open Verdict Deaths in the U.K. Regular Armed Forces.
One request that users of both sites still have is for data to be made available in standardized formats. The U.K. site does include a prominent promotion of the Semantic Web, no doubt a tribute to Berners-Lee's focus on the paradigm as the next step for the future of the web. More standardized, structured data is expected to be the direction that the program tries to get government agencies to move toward in the future.
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Did you manage to get the UK Data site to load Marshall?
I haven't been able to get on this site but in the UK data is much easier to come by than in the US. The Freedom of Information Act allows people to get data sets depending on the final use. Many of the government agencies already give access to their data which is a big help. I'd really like to see this site though.
Yes Martin, I did. Doesn't look pretty now though.
Donnie, I think there are lots of data sets available in the US too that data.gov just hasn't put up on the site.
It is worry how people are increasingly losing their privacy. The freedom from the past in the past is slowly eroding away. For example The Internet used to be a very anonymous place but no longer, its all being taken over by governments who are using it as a monioring tool. Another example CCTV cameras on the roads: we were told it was for public safety, now its being used to catch motorists for the slightest of errors which are then penalised heavily.
They often use the excuse that its to help as in security but its just big brother coming into action, taking over the lives of people, and for reasons other then whats' stated on the tin. Seems very crook like.
On top of standardised data formats, other improvements for the UK site would be a filtered search and better management of and linking to the actual data files. Many links go through to pages where you have to search for the relevant data file. Also better descriptive meta data would be good. Early days but good to see this happening.
@moneygram In case you missed the announcement, this data is all non-personal, so it's difficult to see how privacy is infringed. It's stats about traffic accidents, air passengers, agriculture, school results, etc. not a record of how much waste a particular person produced or names of those in Edinburgh who have cancer.
One good exposure of a public data set here in the US is behind the Be A Martian website from NASA's JPL - http://BeAMartian.jpl.nasa.gov
there is a huge amount of data revealed to allow developers to dig in for the Pathfinder Innovation Challenge as well
The US has fully open USGS data. Britain, on the other hand, has never opened their Ordnance Survey data. You still have to pay (a lot) to use UK map data.
Let's temper that comment: even postcodes are not free in the UK, neither is official OS map data (OS ordnance survey geodata).
On the whole then the UK looks to me to be still some way behind.
However, all the liberated data is self-describing which, in case this is a digital-data arms race means the UK has put the after-burners on.
Think I understand what the Berners-Lee initiative is about, though any mention of the words "Government" and "Data" in the same sentence make me shiver.
Paul G., that used to be the case, but the OS data should be freely on its way. Which will be awesome. Ordnance survey maps are freaking fantastic. I've sat on bench-sized rocks marked on them.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/17/ordnance-survey-maps-online
@Bort and @Paul - Good news! The BBC reports that Nigel Shadbolt "said they were 'currently in discussion' with the OS and were hopeful that the data would be available on 1 April." They added "in November, the government announced that most Ordnance Survey map data would be freely available online in 2010."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8470797.stm
This article states an important fact that is orders of magnitude off.
Data.gov has over 100,000 datasets, not 1000 datasets. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/blog/09/07/24/DatagovSurpasses100000Datasets/
This should be corrected in the post.
Kol, I don't see 100k datasets on the site. Do you?
@Kol - The US site has 969 raw data sets, 464 'tools' and 167,585 geo data sets. Maybe it was the geo stuff you were thinking about?
As more and more sites start to take advantage of the technology powering data.gov.uk, it is vital that all of them can share their content with each other. By providing consistent, stable and described identifiers for the real-world things that the data is about, all of these disparate websites can link relevant material. Facts, figures and ideas can only be linked properly if everyone knows the right identifiers to use – basically we all need to be singing from the same hymn sheet when talking about something on the internet, be it a company, person, or even an abstract concept.
I just come across this data.gov.uk site it's good and looks like it has a good future ahead.
Thanks Marshall for the pointer to the site.
I now know what I need to do with my website www.multivision.uk.com to make it more informative.