The Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced that Ordnance Survey maps will be freely available online from April 2010 , as part of a government drive to give people greater access to public information.
Speaking at a seminar on Smarter Government in Downing Street on Tuesday, the Prime Minister described how the government and Ordnance Survey – the UK’s national mapping agency – would put facts and figures in the hands of the people, enabling them to challenge or demand innovation in public services. “We are determined to be the first government in the world to open up public information in a way that is far more accessible to the general public,” he said.
The move will allow members of the public to input their postcode and gain access to statistics on crime, health and education in their area. It will also enable developers to combine separate sets of data in order to compare results. For example, they could compare data on the number of community wardens in a particular area with the crime statistics to see if the two are related.
“Ordnance Survey is a world renowned mapping expert and making the data they hold about local areas, like council boundaries and postcodes, readily available is an important first step to a more open government,” said Communities Secretary John Denham. “We want people to be able to compare the outcomes and the costs for their own local services with the services delivered elsewhere, and suggest means of improving and driving change that help cut out duplication and waste, and make sure that every pound of public money is working as hard as it can.”
The government sees its open data policy as an important part of its broader efforts to strengthen democracy. According to minister for Digital Britain Stephen Timms, “About 80 percent of public sector data mentions a place. Making Ordnance Survey data more freely available will encourage more effective exploitation of public data by businesses, individuals and community organisations.”
The government claims that open availability of data is as important on a local level as it is nationally, as it helps to connect communities and gives people the tools to demand action on issues that matter to them. John Denham is working with Stephen Timms, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (founder of the World Wide Web) and Nigel Shadbolt (Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Southampton), to ensure that the government’s work embraces local services.
According to Professor Shadbolt, people tend to be most interested in “hyper locality” – what is going on in their street or postcode. However, Shabolt told the BBC that he thinks developers have shied away from Ordnance Survey data in the past because of the restrictions on its use. The geographical data is currently only available free of charge to small scale developers, and Ordnance Survey’s “fair use” policy requires people to apply for commercial licenses at £5,000 a go once their website reaches a certain limit.
The government’s decision to provide greater access to public data is partly in response to the Guardian newspaper’s ‘Free Our Data‘ campaign, which aims to promote “data openness”. The paper has campaigned for more than three years to persuade the government to “abandon copyright on essential national data, making it freely available to anyone, while keeping the crucial task of collecting that data in the hands of taxpayer-funded agencies”.
In his speech on Tuesday Gordon Brown said “We live in exciting times; a digital age of high-speed communications and information just a click away that is transforming our daily routines. Technological advances and rising customer expectations are revolutionising how we all do things. Today’s announcement responds to the demands for better use and access to data held by government. In this new world, smarter government is not an option but a necessity.”
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The CLG press release and number 10 TV both provide evidence that this will not be all data free for all. Some data, mostly the key 'infratsructure' data such as boundaries and postcodes are expected to be free for all. These are the vital frameworks by which the other 1000s of data sets can be aggregated and analysed. This focus enables users to build the much in demand social value of data collected by government. Most users will then display this information online using existing mapping interfaces such as OpenLayers, Bing and GE.