Tim Berners-Lee to launch British government’s free data website

January 21, 2010 by Infowars Ireland

By Charles Arthur
guardian.co.uk

Data.gov.uk expected to be officially launched tomorrow, offering free access to huge wealth of public-sector data

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, is expected to lead the formal launch tomorrow of data.gov.uk, a new British government website offering free access to a huge amount of public-sector data for private or commercial reuse.

The aim is to encourage British web developers and companies to create websites and information feeds that combine the data with other information such as time, maps or other datasets – and potentially to discover hidden patterns that may not be obvious from the raw information.

The beta version of the site was announced with a blogpost by the Cabinet Office’s director of digital engagement last September, which sought web developers “to work with us to use the data to create great applications”.

The government has previously sponsored a competition, Show Us A Better Way asking for examples of what people would do with public sector information and with a £20,000 prize fund. Among the winners were maps for local recycling, cycle paths, school catchment areas and postbox locations.

People who have seen early versions of data.gov.uk say that it contains tools that make it “much easier for [government] departments to produce structured, linked data”. Harry Metcalfe, an independent developer who has developed and worked on a number of sites that use government data to produce public information, commented that “this is such an encouraging thing to see. No expensive procurement exercises for clunky, bespoke sites: instead we have the right tools for the job, joined together … this is how government IT should work.”

The US government already has a similar site, data.gov, set up by the incoming Obama administration last year and officially launched in May by the US’s “chief information officer”, Vivek Kundra. London also launched a “datastore” earlier this month, hosting a number of London-specific datasets corralled from government departments as well as Transport for London data.

After a long-running campaign by the Guardian which began in March 2006 demanding that the government make the non-personal data it collects available for unrestricted reuse, the launch marks a significant victory – especially together with plans announced by Gordon Brown in November to make Ordnance Survey mapping data and some postcode data also available for free.

Berners-Lee was hired last June by Gordon Brown, to ensure “that government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people”. Read more…