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 [...]
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.
Can we use public data to create jobs?
This is really a post designed to encourage people to read an interesting piece by Birmingham based Paul Bradshaw over that the Online Journalism Blog. It’s a month or so old because Paul was responding to news that Tim Berners Lee (the man who invented the World Wide Web) will be working on ways to [...]
Great Use of Data Part 3: RewiredState.org
This is part of our ‘Great use of Data’ series in which we explore projects and applications that use data in new and existing ways. Who are they? RewiredState has concluded that what the Government does with public data, can be done better by geeks. Through a series of initiatives, they encourage people to get [...]
