Sir Berners-Lee’s latest venture for the UK government

Today, BBC News informs us about a launch of a new website, data.gov.uk, which will give the public access to more than 2,500 sets of government-held non-personal data, ranging from traffic statistics, exam results, house prices, local amenities and services to crime figures. The primary objective of this site, as said by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, is to “unlock new ideas for delivering public services, help communities and society work better, and let talented entrepreneurs and engineers create new businesses and services”.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt from the University of Southampton in June 2009 to oversee this project and open up the official data to the general public. Sir Tim justified the launch of the new site to BBC News by saying that “Government data is something we have already spent the money on… and when it is sitting there on a disk in somebody’s office it is wasted”. Likewise, the third collaborator on this project, Stephen Trimms, Minister for Digital Britain, believes that data.gov.uk “is a tremendous opportunity for UK firms to secure better value for money in service delivery and to develop innovative services which will help to grow the economy”.

A beta version of data.gov.uk has been running since September 2009 and so far has been tested by more than 2,400 developers. Like the iPhone, the software for the site will be left as ‘open source’ so that people can develop applications for it. Currently, the site has 19 applications created using the data feeds, including ‘FillThatHole’ for reporting potholes across the UK, ‘mycounciltax.org.uk’ for finding out how much council tax you pay for your property and ‘UK House Prices’ for looking at property market trends using Land Registry data.

The creators of data.gov.uk work tirelessly with departments, agencies and local authorities to release even more data and add more functions to the site all the time. For example, one of the key data sets they are trying to include is geographical location from the Ordnance Survey (OS), which currently is only available free of charge to small-scale developers. It is planned that this data will be released to public from April 2010.

Others, including US President Barack Obama and London Mayor Boris Johnson, launched similar sites such as data.gov, which offers feeds from various departments including the US defence department and Nasa and an online data warehouse with more than 200 data sets relevant to life in the British capital.