Urgent: Sign up for Treasury’s COINS seminar
As I’ve previously written, the COINS database is not just a very significant release of open data, it’s also quite hard to get your head round. With this in mind, Her Majesty’s Treasury is holding a seminar on July 2 2010, from 9.30am to 12.30pm for coders and others who want to understand more about [...]
Learning about the COINS database: a few useful links
A couple of weeks ago the government did something really significant. No, it wasn’t anything to do with the Big Society – significant though that may be. It was the release of one enormous database, known as COINS. Essentially COINS (and I do really like writing it in capitals) is the detail on everything the [...]
Data scraping using Google Docs spreadsheets
Thanks to Paul Bradshaw I recently came across a post by Tony Hirst who has very helpfully provided an extraordinary lesson in the joys (and I do mean joys) of scraping data using Google Docs, which I strongly recommend following if you’re at all interested in these sorts of things and haven’t seen it (it [...]
SpeedData: Chris Taggart on Open Election Data
Chris Taggart of OpenlyLocal spoke briefly during his presentation about his work with several councils to provide open election data for the elections on May 6. As Chris points out it is something of a surprise that election data isn’t just available freely. But it isn’t. Well, at least until Chris got involved. I got [...]
SpeedData: Rob Benson of BEN PCT
Rob Benson handles E-communications for Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trust. During SpeedData Rob spoke about how it might be quite difficult to get some people within organisations to appreciate the reasons for making data available, particularly within an institution like the NHS where issues of privacy are particularly important. But Rob was taken [...]
SpeedData: Alex Burrows of Centro
Alex Burrows is the head of strategy at Centro, the public transport authority for the West Midlands. He explained that Centro deals with enormous amounts of data, but has until now perhaps not been as aware of some of the interesting things that other people might be prepared to do with their data. I spoke [...]
Open Data in Lincoln
Andrew Beeken has blogged on how he set up a very simple WordPress blog to start the process of opening up data at Lincoln. As he explains, he’s going to be publicising it in Lincoln and will report back on the reaction it gets. Andrew’s data.lincoln.gov.uk site sets a good example of just how it’s [...]
So how generous is Ordnance Survey OpenData?
At the beginning of this month (apologies, we’re a bit late) the Government announced that much of the mapping data held by the Ordnance Survey would be released free to the public.
Developed data tells us something about life
A lot of talk (especially on this blog) is all about opening up government data so developers, journalists and citizens can use it in a way which is useful for the public good. Emma Mulqueeny, who works with government departments to reach this goal and is founder of Rewired State, points out on her blog [...]
