www.data.gov.uk launched today, which sees the government join – and arguably take a lead in – the ‘open data revolution.’
You can read all about it here and at the site’s own blog.
At time of writing the web site was crashing and no doubt there will be lots of coverage on another Government failure. However, at its launch there are bound to be glitches and to focus on the negative would be the narrow minded thing to do. Let’s instead look at something all together more interesting.
What does this mean for the vast majority of UK businesses? It means that more data than ever is available. The availability of ‘perfect information’ is one of the key tenets of the free market, so making this content available is arguably going to create efficiencies.
Crucially, third party developers can now create their own applications to process the data. These are then uploaded onto the site and available to all. There are already applications available such as this one which looks at house prices.
From a PR and marketing perspective there are two immediately interesting considerations:
- Does the ability to build applications for clients present a commercial opportunity? For example, agencies could build an augmented reality tourism guide for UK cities, which might be ideal for hotels, or leisure sector organisations? Consultancies might choose to create an ‘economic report’ application, for accountancy firms or banking clients. There are endless options here for consultancies to consider.
- Is the site a risk for the Government that could backfire? For example, how will the Government be able to manage the development of third party applications? How long will it be until, say, the Conservative party build an application which turns the Government’s own data on itself? We have already seen The Guardian use crowd sourcing to examine MPs expenses and this sort of content will be much easier to create thanks to this website. Will the Government fall on its sword? Or, will a mischievous anarchist group or a terrorist organisation build applications which can be used against the state. Imagine the negative headlines!
The latter point, of course, is the product of an over fertile imagination and one would think that the Government has already weighed up the risks.
Launching the site is a brave move and let’s hope that it proves to be successful. The Office of National Statistics’ website was always slow and clunky to interrogate. It helped if users had a grasp of advanced statistics, to really make the data work for you.
Now, via the third party applications, access to data should be a lot easier.