Data.Gov.UK - Raw Data Today

About a year ago the Long Beach Civic Hall was full of people chanting "Raw Data Now" - it was Sir Tim (Berners Lee, not Rice) at TED making an evangelical case for the freedom of data that the taxpayer essentially funds.

Well, clearly crowd sourcing like this works, and those of us who were there from the UK must have shouted loudest - as today the UK government opens a fairly impressive raft of data - BBC:

A new website, data.gov.uk, will offer reams of public sector data, ranging from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use.

The target is to kickstart a new wave of services that find novel ways to make use of the information.

Its on www.data.gov.uk

A beta version has been going since September, which has a number services - it will kick off today with 2,500 datasets. One of the main barriers is to get geographical location from the Ordnance Survey (OS) free. This is still paid for and thus prevents a number of location based mashups, the darling of the day.

London Mayor Boris Johnson has also announced the city's authorities will open an online data warehouse on 29 January with more than 200 data sets relevant to life in the capital.

This is a Good Thing, and hopefully more will become available - its my view that if this is done a whole lot of services -unimaginable today - will emerge to remove many frictions in our life today. I hope it also helps sort out the many small contradictions in the various systems.