Tim Berners-Lee unveils government data project | Hacker News Reader

Tim Berners-Lee unveils government data project

news.bbc.co.uk

28 pointsjacquesm9 comments

It's huge. I just wish they hadn't released the data under Crown Copyright, and that they'd remained impartial rather than sticking a great big Twitter advertisement on the side.

This post is a great analysis in my opinion: http://paulclarke.com/honestlyreal/2010/01/welcoming-data-go...

It's a start. I think the 'government without secrets' is one that is inevitable, I hope to see it during my lifetime.

This is just a first step on that road. FOI in government is the only way to go.

Someone at your link, in the comments (edit: just realised that it's you), claims the Crown Copyright means re-use is reliant on a revocable licence. Is that true? How can that be compatible with Creative Commons as they suggest here:

http://data.gov.uk/terms-conditions/

I'm a bit more worried by "you must ensure that you do not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the information".

I don't even want them to restrict distortions, mutilations or derogatory actions (whatever the hell that might mean in relation to the location of public loos, or government spending figures). However, "ensure you do not ... modify ... the information" seems to defeat the whole purpose of the project.

> However, "ensure you do not ... modify ... the information" seems to defeat the whole purpose of the project.

If you could modify the data then you could essentially make stuff up and claim that it's based on data from data.gov.uk. Wouldn't _that_ rather defeat the purpose of the project?

Nothing a digital signature can't take care of.

You don't even need a digital signature - just have them publish a hash value for the files.

Of course, the two most useful datasets are not yet there...

1. Postcode data 2. Mapping data

3. the BBC's back catalogue

A lot of metadata around the BBC's archives are available through /programmes in a variety of machine-readable formats, including RDF.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/developers

For example, Eastenders

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006m86d http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006m86d.rdf

Older programme data is added continuously, but TV catch-up is limited to UK users within a 7-day window.

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