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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]