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Data.gov.uk March 2011
Data.gov.uk
Data.gov.uk

A year of data.gov.uk

This article is more than 13 years old
A year ago data.gov.uk launched to fanfare and acclaim. Twelve months later, founder Nigel Shadbolt looks at what it's achieved

A year ago Tim Berners-Lee and I unveiled data.gov.uk – a year on and it provides a single point of access to nearly 6,000 government data sets.

Everything from local authorities spending to the whereabouts of the nations bus stops, from energy consumption in ministries to infection rates in hospitals.
This idea of making public data available has really caught hold. In this country it not only survived the election – but new commitments to transparency and open data have been made. Other countries, regional authorities and individual cities are all making data available. This newspaper has reported on and participated in this data revolution. Data underlies increasing amounts of journalism. The Guardian has argued that open data can rebalance the relationship between those who govern and the citizen. Grand sounding stuff – but how does it work?

It works because people take government data and use it to hold power to account, to re-engineer public services or to create new businesses. This shift is enabling new, disruptive services to spring up. Services like Fix My Street reduce the pain of finding the right telephone number or form to report local problems ranging from dog fouling to broken streetlights. The site Who's Lobbying helps to keep track of who is meeting which UK government ministers; whilst School-o-Scope makes school performance information useable. Spotlight on Spend shows not just how various councils are spending our money but who is in receipt of it.

Open public data makes for more transparency. The provision of detailed information relating to taxation, spending, education, transport, energy, environment, crime, health and so on, enables citizens to be better informed and able to make comparisons within and between their locales. Information in these sectors holds the providers of public services accountable – from spending on infrastructure to the timeliness of transport; from death rates in hospitals to employability of graduates.

Open public data can generate real economic returns – examples include looking at spending patterns to determine intelligent procurement and building smart transportation applications from publically aggregated time-table data. These applications are built outside of normal procurement and exploit data in ways not anticipated by the collecting agency.

Open data can support more for less. Examples range from more efficient procurement to reducing the costs of servicing Freedom of Information requests. Open data can also be the agent of its own improvement. Public data is often incomplete, out of date or of variable quality. The eagerly awaited comprehensive spending data from the Treasury (COINS) disappointed many – it was hard to fathom and difficult to interpret. Data improvement is possible once data is openly published and a feedback means provided. Whether it is the location of bus stops or potholes, spending by local or central government – the public, you and me, provides a powerful resource to improve data.

The last year has seen a great deal of progress. The introduction of the Open Government Licence grants blanket permission to re-use the majority of government data. We have established a number of core Public Data Principles that determine the 'what' and 'how' for publishing government data to the Web, and we have set out a simple '5 stars of openness' test for judging how open and re-useable data is.

Despite this progress there is a huge amount still to do. We have to change the behaviour of public servants and Ministers so that they make data available without being asked. We need to establish a constant flow of the information that government and local authorities hold. This includes management, performance, regulatory, service, historical and comparative data … transport, weather, environment; all of which allow the building of end-user applications.

We still need a general strategy to ensure that transparency principles are extended to those who operate public services on a franchised, regulated or subsidised basis. The recent announcement to establish a Public Data Corporation is a move to bring together important holders of public data such as the Ordnance Survey, Met Office and Land Registry. We have to ensure that one of the founding roles of the PDC is the release of free open data. Otherwise there is the risk that a large holder of public data will make it harder to release information for overall benefit.

data.gov.uk itself was originally designed for developers, and is pretty spartan. There is now a wider interest in government data and its visualisation, and we need to increase its usability and utility to a much wider audience.

The data released so far shows the lack of consistency and re-usability that exists at the moment. A simple example is the lack of a common unique identifier for each supplier across government – a symptom of the lack of a joined-up approach to procurement. Improving the UK's information landscape needs this kind of still constant attention.

One of our next phases of work is to amend Freedom of Information legislation and to create a "Right to Data" to give the public extra means to obtain data from public bodies. However, there is still no reliable inventory of what data government actually holds. So we still cannot measure the extent to which Government as a whole, or individual departments, are releasing their data. The public simply do not know what data they could request through a "Right to Data".

We should not let these challenges detract from the very considerable achievements of the past year. They are achievements that are being emulated and copied around the world. This open government data revolution could be as important as any we have seen in the Web era.

Nigel Shadbolt sits on the Public Sector Transparency Board and Chairs the Local Public Data Panel. He and Tim Berners-Lee led the development of data.gov.uk – he is a Professor of AI at the University of Southampton

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