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?