Thursday, November 22, 2007
HMRC loses records on 25 million people in the post | OUT-LAW.COM
HMRC loses records on 25 million people in the post | OUT-LAW.COM
When I said 'free our data' I didn't mean that data!
When I said 'free our data' I didn't mean that data!
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Free Our Data: Make taxpayers' data available to them
I'm interested in free public data from a personal and professional perspective - it's moderately ludicrous that I can't easily get a list of all the schools in the UK and I wish I could get raw mapping data todo what I want with it rather than what some 'trading fund' thinks I should do...
Free Our Data: Make taxpayers' data available to them: "On March 9 2006 the Guardian's Technology supplement carried an article called 'Give us back our crown jewels'. The argument is simple: government-funded and approved agencies such as the Ordnance Survey and UK Hydrographic Office and Highways Agency are government-owned agencies; they collect data on our behalf. So why can't we get at that data as easily as we can Google Maps or the Xtides program? Even though OS and the UK Hydrographic Office are designated as trading funds (which means that they operate as self-contained commercial entities receiving no direct tax funding), substantial parts of their income - up to 50% in the case of OS - comes from the public sector; meaning, in effect, they are part-paid by taxes. Yet they charge for that data, with onerous copyright restrictions that prevent the re-use of the data."
Free Our Data: Make taxpayers' data available to them: "On March 9 2006 the Guardian's Technology supplement carried an article called 'Give us back our crown jewels'. The argument is simple: government-funded and approved agencies such as the Ordnance Survey and UK Hydrographic Office and Highways Agency are government-owned agencies; they collect data on our behalf. So why can't we get at that data as easily as we can Google Maps or the Xtides program? Even though OS and the UK Hydrographic Office are designated as trading funds (which means that they operate as self-contained commercial entities receiving no direct tax funding), substantial parts of their income - up to 50% in the case of OS - comes from the public sector; meaning, in effect, they are part-paid by taxes. Yet they charge for that data, with onerous copyright restrictions that prevent the re-use of the data."
