Date published: 2008/07/02
The BBC says:
The UK government has launched a competition to find innovative ways of using the masses of data it collects.
It is hoping to find new uses for public information in the areas of criminal justice, health and education.
The Power of Information Taskforce - headed by cabinet office minister Tom Watson - is offering a £20,000 prize fund for the best ideas.
To help with the task, the government is opening up gigabytes of information from a variety of sources.
This includes mapping information from the Ordnance Survey, medical information from the NHS , neighbourhood statistics from the Office for National Statistics and a carbon calculator from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
It's about time. The UK government has for far too long kept this kind of important data either inaccessible or extortionate in cost. The Ordnance Survey is a prime example. It's mapping data should have been opened up long ago, and it is presumably only because of google that it has (partly) done so now. But pretty much everybody uses google now and the OS has missed the boat.
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