Data & Stuff

Late last week, Data.gov.uk was released with a fanfare opening from Tim Berners-Lee [Guardian Coverage].

It looks good, but what is it really about?

Luckily I’ve had access to the site whilst it was in private testing, and am able to get an insight into the development world through an associated email group.

The simple thing is, YES it’s great – opening up data, for reuse, how could it not be.

Though NO, it’s not ‘great for the general public end user’. By that I mean, the general public will almost indoubtly benefit due to the applications and products that get developed due to this openness and transparency of data.

For instance, want to know Where Does Your Money Go. This was a concept that was developed through the Show Us A Better Way competition – a precursor, and almost a proof of concept that opening up data is good for us all.

So whilst the outputs are likely to be interesting, I don’t think its necessarily going to be top of every UK citizens todo list to checkout http://data.gov.uk often.

There are a lot of good things that have already come from the site, and this Top 10 Government Data Visualisations from the Guardian demonstrates just some of the talent out there .

I’ll certainly be looking at what is coming out utilising the data available, what mashups get made and such. Meanwhile I need to tune up my Ruby, RDF, SPARQL, etc knowledge to be able to take full advantage. I just don’t think that Joe Public will be doing that.

Maybe I’m just wrong?

These are my links for January 5th through January 18th:

• Visualisations Applications – A huge resource of services, links and other related visualisations tools.
• Redesigning the Boarding Pass – Journal – Boarding Pass / Fail – Showing how a boarding pass could be redesigned, to allow for clearer understanding and conveying of the important information.
• Crayon | Luxirare – An interesting mix of food and design.
• Andy Huntington Interaction & Sound » Datadecs – For Christmas 2009 the Really Interesting Group wanted to create a a gift comprising a series of 4 unique decorations based on each recipient’s use of the Flickr, Dopplr, Last.fm and Twitter. Having used a couple of the software APIs they were thinking about using (flickr and dopplr) and with experience of rapid prototyping we worked together to turn the data into something physical.
• 9 Ways to Visualize Proportions – A Guide | FlowingData – A nice post about size, and proportions in graphics.

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