Richard's Kingdom

The Power of Information Task Force, championed by Tom Watson MP, has announced a fantastic new Open Government initiative: a public-data mashup competition!

It’s great that the Government is soliciting new ideas for re-using public information, but what’s even better is that this competition is accompanied by a whole raft of new public APIs, and the release of gigabytes of previously inaccessible data.

The sometimes restrictive licensing terms applied to Crown-copyright materiel are a sore point for advocates of open access to Government information, who argue that since the collection of such data is funded through taxation, charging for using it amounts to double-dipping.

I applaud this new initiative, which represents a positive change in attitude towards public access to public data.

Get your thinking caps on people. What whizzy data mashups would you like to see coming out of UK.gov?

Tagged as government, mashup, openaccess, opendata, openrightsgroup, showusabetterway, technology, uk + Categorized as technology