Sir Tim Berners-Lee said at the launch of the beta site of data.gov.uk last week, "This is very much the beginning. Hopefully, this is the tip of the iceberg. There is a whole lot more to do." But what a beginning!
The range of applications made available in the week before launch outstripped our expectations and clearly impressed Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt at the launch event hosted at the Guardian’s offices in Kings Cross. To date there are already 28 applications on the data.gov.uk site with more being added every day.
In his address Tim explained why putting public data on the web is so valuable: "If you put data on what your Department looks after on the web, people can see what you have been doing over time. Then you are able to compare this against other data to find trends, compare locations, run statistical analysis and maybe find new unexpected links to other data that the original Department had never envisaged."
Nigel Shadbolt continued "Seeing applications added (to the data.gov.uk site) within 40 minutes of each other this morning indicates the appetite of the developer community. This project did not just engage the developer community but was pushed and prodded by them."
Indeed the showcase of applications produced by those developers who had seen an earlier version of the site back in September pointed to some really interesting and unexpected uses of the data made available.
Developers who presented their work at the launch included Christian Heilmann (Yahoo!), Chris Osborne (ITOworld), David McCandless (Information is Beautiful), Richard Pope (ScraperWiki), Matthew Sommerville (Mysociety), Tom Taylor (Newspaper Club) and Simon Willison (The Guardian).
Christian Heilmann produced a graphic means of showing change in house prices over time with an app that used house price data from data.gov.uk. Perhaps most impressive was his ability to ‘clean up’ his app in the time it took to travel from Covent Garden to Piccadilly on the Underground! His blog features a very useful explanation of how the app was put together.
Chris Osborne introduced ITOworld’s work on an automated transport mapping system which featured the ability to add layers for shops and services on top of local transport services data. These could then be customised by the user to produce Harry Beck style maps of local transport for any location in the UK. While the version shown was still in development and some of the data required is, as yet, unavailable it clearly indicated the potential for developers to produce applications that can make a significant difference for people even when offline.
David McCandless showed some of his stunning visualisations from his Information is Beautiful blog, one of which, the Billion-Pound-O-Gram, makes use of HM Treasury data.
Perhaps one of our favourites (although not currently on data.gov.uk) was the app shown by Simon Willison of the Guardian allowing users to tag the location of species on a map. Who knew there was a 41m strong shrew population in the UK?
