Martin De Saulles
resulted in a growth of open access journals and a belief amongst many in the scientific community that opening up access to the results of leading‐edge research can only benefit society( Arzberger et al. 2004). However, this ethos has also permeated to public sector information where, arguably, the data may be less interesting than ground‐breaking scientific research but can be put to socially beneficial uses. In the US, this has been applied to tracking and publishing details of where politicians and parties obtain their funding( Bender 2010, Newman 2010), to the freeing of corporate financial data from expensive databases that had been the preserve on investment bankers( Brito 2010). In the UK, one of the more high‐profile initiatives has been the creation of crime mapping services that combine crime statistics with mapping services such as Google Maps to produce very localised maps of criminal activity around the country( Chainey and Tompson 2012).
Many of these not‐for‐profit services rely on the combining of different data sets, what is often referred to as mashups. Crucial to the success of these mashups is for their creators to have access to data which is in a format that can be manipulated via automated routines. This requires the originating data to be presented in a structured format that can be understood by computers i. e. machine‐readable. One of the leading proponents of the need for public bodies to offer their data in machine‐readable formats has been the British creator of the WWW, Tim Berners‐Lee, who has argued the need for‘ linked data’. This builds on the principles behind the success of the WWW which allows for links to easily be made between web pages. This idea has been taken up by the UK Government which in January 2010 launched a web portal( www. data. gov. uk) providing access to many thousands of public sector data sets. As of 28 December 2012 it contained 8,981 datasets from 786 publishers comprising central government departments, local councils, National Health Trusts and an assortment of other public bodies. There is an understandable concentration of data sets from the larger bodies with the ten largest publishers accounting for 45 % of all data sets. Much of this data is published under the terms of the Open Government Licence which was released by the UK National Archive in September 2010. This allows for the re‐use and re‐publishing of the information under the following terms:
“ The Licensor grants you a worldwide, royalty‐free, perpetual, non‐exclusive licence to use the information subject to the conditions below:
You are free to: Copy, publish, and distribute the Information; Adapt the Information;
Exploit the Information commercially for example, by combining it with other Information, or by including it in your own product or application.”
( The National Archive 2010)
The restrictions imposed by this licence are relatively minor with the main condition of re‐use being an acknowledgement of the original source.
While the data. gov. uk initiative has been welcomed by many in the open data community, there are concerns about how innovative it really is. Janssen( 2011) points to the growth in the data sets it contains from 2,500 at launch to over 6,900 18 months later but questions whether it is really presenting any new data that was not already available via other sources,
“ Since data. gov. uk does not really seem to be demand‐driven, but rather based on what datasets are laying in the public bodies’ cupboards and that may be considered interesting for the citizens by the government, one could wonder whether data. gov. uk will indeed be a considerable contribution to innovation.”( Janssen 2011, p451)
The UK coalition government which came into power in May 2010 has stated it aims to develop and extend the scope of the data. gov. uk initiative and has incorporated it into its‘ transparency agenda’ which aims to make the workings of the state more easily accessible to the electorate. However, a National Audit Office report in April 2012 was critical of how far these intentions were actually being realised( NAO 2012). While the report’ s authors acknowledge that progress had been made with the Open Government Licence they were concerned that the disclosure of information by public bodies was not systematic and lacked consistency while it was difficult, if not impossible, for data users to be confident of the quality of many data sets. A UK Cabinet Office White Paper published in June 2012 reinforced the government’ s commitment to open data and the data. gov. uk initiative but the proposals it outlined will take several years to be realised.
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