MapTube, Crime and Privacy

Chris Osborne posted a comment to an earlier entry drawing our attention to a MapTube project mapping crime in London. This deserves a fuller article as it demonstrates a number of interesting points.
1. MapTube itself is worth a mention. This initiative from UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) is a great demonstrator [...]

OPSI Annual Report

The Office of Public Sector Information has today published its annual report which has a wealth of useful information for anyone interested in the Power of Information agenda:
The UK Government has today presented to Parliament OPSI’s annual report on the re-use of Public Sector Information. The report has been published as Cm 7446 [...]

European Directive on Public Sector Information

A key piece of legislation affecting the use of public sector information is the European Directive on the Re-use of Public Sector Information. This is perhaps not the most widely known piece of law but is critical in that it places a duty on EU governments to create national policy on public data re-use. [...]

Open Government Data

There is an Open Government Working Group in the US who have a wiki with some good links to US initiatives. This group has published a set of principles for open government data and invites discussion on these.

Richard Allan, Task Force Chair

The highlight of Opentech – New data unlocking service

Our kind friends in the Office of Public Sector Information stole our thunder at Opentech. Amongst all the other interesting things going on they very quietly announced their new data unlocking service.
The proposition is very simple. If you have any problems accessing public information then you contact OPSI. The way their service works is:

“You describe [...]

Government Data and the Invisible Hand

A group of academics at Princeton University in the US has published a very interesting paper called ‘Government Data and the Invisible Hand’.
This quote from the Abstract gives a sense of its strong alignment with the Power of Information thinking in the UK:
Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than [...]

Two new APIs and a couple of chunky zip files…

A crack team of data ferrets working for the Task Force have returned from their first forays into the bowels of Government. And lo, they come bearing gigabytes of juicy data, most of which is ready to share in handy API format. Check out the Office of National Statistics Neighbourhood Statistics API for an [...]

Announcing ShowUsABetterWay.com

The Task Force is delighted to announce the launch of ShowUsABetterWay.com , a competition inviting the public to suggest ideas for new products which re-use public information
There’s a prize fund of up to £20,000 to take the best ideas to the next stage of their development, and the competition if open until the end of [...]