Public Data Sets Available to Integrate
Insight / Tuesday 2 February 2010
In early January Boris Johnson launched the website data.london.gov.uk, providing access to a vast amount of publicly available historical data about Greater London. The site contains over 200 sets of data covering a wide range of subjects, including information on crime, house prices, ethnic group populations, hospital admissions and census data. In addition a further site www.data.gov.uk has also been launched that provides unprecedented access to public data; Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is the driving force behind this.
The website aims to make publicly available data far easier to access for everyone, and it is hoped that other government departments around the country will follow and release similar data into the public domain.
The quantity and nature of the data presents interesting opportunities for software development, and it will be exciting to see how this data is used to produce useful applications in the near future. For example, the site www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/prototype details where public money is being spent with an intuitive interface.
Channel 4's 4iP project is offering £200,000 in total to two companies or individuals that have the best ideas for ways to use the available data in new software applications.
We hope that access to the large amounts of public data will generate ideas for new systems or bolt-ons to current systems that will be useful and generate traffic. We at Xibis would be happy to discuss your ideas and going forward being able to develop and deploy your ideas into your systems. Examples of the data sets that are available include crime figures, wide range of statistical data, property prices, flooding risks, GP locations and road traffic data. Please see the www.data.gov.uk site for the data sets that are available.