In recent years, the central government in the UK has been involved in pushing an open data agenda, not only on its home turf, but also globally through the Open Government Partnership of which it was one of the eight founding members. The idea is to create governments that are more open, accessible and accountable by giving the public access to a vast array of datasets that are downloadable and reusable.
The UK has had varying degrees of success with this at a central government level – it is working to fulfil its commitments and has released thousands of datasets, which can be found at data.gov.uk, but has also been struggling with unleashing information from complex legacy systems.
However, in the pipeline there are plans to create a National Information Infrastructure, which will ultimately contain all public data in a way that can be accessed by anyone, in real time. Recent efforts have also been championed by inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who heads up the government’s Open Data Institute – which aims to nurture innovative data driven start-ups and support organisations in working effectively with open data. Continue>>>
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