Open Local Data Blog

Last month’s announcement by the UK government of plans for a single public data body had a mixed reception. Well, now you can tell them what you think.

The consultation website (ok, blog with a load of questions) is hosted by the Cabinet Office, so it’s all official. They’re not actually asking your opinion on the idea of a body though, but on the data itself:

“We’re especially interested in your thoughts on datasets and data products created by public sector organisations that are focused on:

• registration activities, e.g. registering a business;
• environmental science issues, including natural hazards;
• critical infrastructure; and
• the built environment.”

Apparently the website ‘will be running from 14 February to 11 March’; although as that was itself apparently posted on the 11th, it’s hard to tell what the real timescale is.

When the initial announcement was made I tried to be optimistic; many others though expressed concern, including Openly Local’s Chris Taggart.

The Big Society machine already seems to be swamping us with consultations and opportunities to ’scrutinise’ everything under the sun. However, if you’re enthusiastic about the future of open data then this one is probably worth a little of your time.

The UK Police have published their crime map, showing levels of crime by street and postcode. But will this culture of publicly visible information have the positive impact that we hope it will, or can that happen only if we develop our skills and attitudes?

The ability to see the stark figures of reported crime on your street is going to make a lot of people very nervous, possibly even too scared to go outside. If I lived in a high crime area I could well be one of them. So all I would do would be to ignore the map completely and never look at it again. Not, I suspect, what the Police had in mind.

Of course, this map is just one application of the underlying data. The idea behind linked data is that we can make connections across datasets, comparing one with another. For example, an agency might take the crime data and overlay it with poverty data so that connections between the two begin to emerge.

However, all the overlays in the world are of little use if people don’t know they exist; the crime map has had major media coverage this morning, and I suspect that most people who are now aware of it are probably still not aware that there could be lots of other ways of understanding that data.

Access to information can be a good thing, but not necessarily in and of itself. Of course, this is all part of the Big Society’s agenda of transparency:

“Public access to public data provides the evidence base for public pressure and action, both on the part of those proposing new ways to deliver services and on the part of service users thus enabled to make an informed choice. This is what we mean by ‘transparency’: the ability to see how government actually works – or doesn’t work.

“…there can be no local innovation without local control of resources. Nor can local decision- making succeed without access to the government data on which informed judgement depends”.

Decentralisation and the Localism Bill: an essential guide

But ‘decision-making’ is about more than ‘informed choice’. It’s about understanding the complexities of a situation, it’s about being able to put other interests before our own and it’s about seeking effective and constructive solutions.

And this is where I think we need to realise that making information open and available publicly is just the beginning. Now we need a culture of interrogation; consumers of information need to be inquisitive, to acknowledge that a given representation is only a small part of the story and to engage with information critically and responsibly.

At the moment these skills of critical evaluation of information, and the exploration of the social, ethical and cultural implications of information technology, are in the school curriculum, within citizenship and ICT. However, both of those subjects are under review; it is possible that neither will be in the curriculum by September 2012. So if schools are not expected to develop the skills necessary for meeting the challenges of Big Society, where will that development happen?

To my mind this will be the big challenge; making available information such as crime figures is just the tip of the iceberg.

Launched today, datamarket.com lets you ‘find, visualise and download the data from many of the world’s most important data providers’.

The datamarket.com homepage tells us we can ‘Visualize the world’s economy, societies, nature, and industries, and gain new insights’, with ‘100 million time series from the most important data providers, such as the UN, World Bank and Eurostat’.

It certainly looks very interesting. Check out the video below.

An introduction to DataMarket.com from hjalli on Vimeo.

(Hat-tip to Paul Bradshaw for flagging this up on his Online Journalism Blog.)

To mark the first year of data.gov.uk The Guardian looks at both the enthusiasm and skepticism of people who want data to be free and re-usable, while I want to know how publishers see it.

In ‘Government data UK: what’s really been achieved?‘ Simon Rogers and Charles Arthur discover that concerns felt by developers include the quality of the data, the proliferation of aggregated reports in lieu of raw data and indications that the Government will bend to the seduction of selling some data instead of making it all available free of charge.

Meanwhile, in ‘A year of data.gov.uk‘ Professor Nigel Shadbolt claims that the idea of publicly available data has ‘really caught hold’. ‘In this country it not only survived the election,’ he says, ‘but new commitments to transparency and open data have been made.’ This, he argues, is because the data is being used to hold power to account, to re-engineer public services and to enable the public to make better decisions.

But that’s from the geeks who want to free the data and re-use it; what about those of you who have to publish it? How do you feel about using data.gov.uk?

A free workshop in London on 10 February will consider the ‘Why, Where and How’ of Linked Data.

The event will address questions such as:

• What is Linked Data?
• What are the first steps I should be taking to start using Linked Data?
• What can I learn from those already working with Linked Data?
• What does my manager (and above!) need to know about Linked Data to help support me?
• How does this fit with Phase 2 of INSPIRE?

The workshop is being run by UK Location in conjunction with the Digital National Framework (DNF) Expert Group and the Chartered Institute for IT.

A guide to publishing data to data.gov.uk appeared yesterday on the government’s data portal.

“A key part of Government’s Transparency agenda is the opening up of data held by Government bodies … To enable people to find and re-use this data in innovative ways, it must be included on data.gov.uk, which acts as a registry holding details of online public data.

“This is a guide for those working to publish their organisation’s data on how it can be included on data.gov.uk. The guide assumes that you already have the data ready to publish (in an open format, with any necessary clearances and redactions made) and are able to put it onto your corporate website or another similar site which allows members of the public to access content. Other guidance is also available on how to prepare data for publication, and specific instructions for centrally-coordinated datasets.”

You can now have your say on the UK government’s Localism Bill. It’s just a shame it’s not as easy as it could be.

There are lots of different things to read, and you have to email your response.

A key plank of the Bill is to make more data available and give the public greater power to use and question it (see Decentralisation and the Localism Bill: an essential guide). As far as I can tell, though, there is no real attempt to use technology to engage members of the general public in drafting the Bill itself.

In fact, I’m not sure they really know who or why they’re asking anyway, other than as standard procedure:

“Do you have relevant expertise and experience or a special interest in the Government’s Localism Bill?”

Er, yes; I’m a citizen, one of those people you want to give more power to.

“If so, you can submit your views in writing to the House of Commons Public Bill Committee which is going to consider this Bill.”

Can’t I just fill in a survey, or answer some oral questions? No? Oh.

Never mind; at least there’s an email address. Have your say on the Localism Bill.

I’ve just come across Open Data Kit, which is ‘a free and open-source set tools [sic] which help organizations author, field, and manage mobile data collection solutions’.

I’ve not played with it, and I don’t know how well it would suit UK use, but according to the Open Data Kit website it enables users to:

• Build a data collection form or survey;
• Collect the data on a mobile device and send it to a server; and
• Aggregate the collected data on a server and extract it in useful formats.

Apparently it’s reached the finals of the ‘Best use of Technology in Government, Non-Profit, or Education’ category of the Washington Technology Association’s 16th annual Industry Achievement Awards.

Publishing data is a start, and publishing it in a common standard that others can understand and re-use is the next step; but wouldn’t it be even more useful if you could see correlations between seemingly unrelated sets of data?

That’s where linked data comes in. The website linkeddata.org puts it like this:

Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods

Creating datasets can be quite technical though, using technologies such as RDF (for storing data) and SPARQL (for retrieving it). They mystify me.

Thankfully though, some people do know what they’re doing. Stuart Harrison, Webmaster at Lichfield District Council, has just started blogging A beginner’s guide to SPARQLing linked data, which takes you through using SPARQL to query sets of linked data.

On Wednesday the Cabinet Office announced plans for a Public Data Corporation, which will be responsible for the availability of UK government data.

The Corporation will attempt to:

“…bring together Government bodies and data into one organisation and provide an unprecedented level of easily accessible public information and drive further efficiency in the delivery of public services”.

Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude said:

“A Public Data Corporation will bring benefits in three areas. Firstly and most importantly it will allow us to make data freely available, and where charging for data is appropriate to do so on a consistent basis. It will be a centre where developers, businesses and members of the public can access data and use it to develop internet applications, inform their business decisions or identify ways to run public services more efficiently. Some of this work is already taking place but there is huge potential to do more.

“Secondly, it will be a centre of excellence where expertise in collecting, managing, storing and distributing data can be brought together. This will enable substantial operational synergies.

“Thirdly, it can be a vehicle which will attract private investment”.

As Glyn Moody points out, this will raise concerns that some datasets will require payment and therefore not be ‘freely’ available. ‘Are we seeing the re-invention of the Ordnance Survey approach all over again?’, he asks.

I’m not so worried yet.

At the moment a lot of data is tied up in complicated licencing; for example, although the government is able to give me the Citizenship Survey Headline Findings, they cannot give me access to the raw survey data because they don’t own it directly. Therefore enabling as much data as possible to be available in the first place, and in a format that is open and linked, is a big task. I’m glad they’re tackling it.

However, I am a bit puzzled by the line ‘The Corporation will, for the first time, bring together Government bodies and data into one organisation’ (my emphasis). Is that just written badly, or do they really intend to merge all the government bodies? (If so it’s probably been all over the news and I, typically, have blissfully missed it.)

But back to the data. Maybe one day we won’t have to pay for any of it at all, but for the time being I think that this effort to bring it together is probably a laudable one.