Open Data and Apps

Mobile Apps World 2010 Open Data & App Development Tiffany St James Wednesday 20 October, 2010

What do we mean by open data • Open data is a philosophy and practice requiring that certain data be freely available to everyone, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.

And our govt means open data by... • Non-personal data • Information not code • Figures, statistics • Excel, tables, csv files • Every report published

Why is this important? • Transparency • Public sector reform • Social benefits • Economic benefits • Global leadership positioning

What did the UK Govt do? • Opened up a repository for data • Made departments publish data • Created an online community of developers • Made ‘linked data’ a reality

Why is this world class? • A way of marking up data for the web • Enables concepts to be linked together • Letting people walk through the data by concept - e.g. data that is about: • Schools • With a budget over £3m • In South East of England

From this…

…To this

It looks like this:

How did they do it? • Work with people who were best in class • Establish processes for release • Build a back end • Soft launch • Blogger briefings • Created visualisations to show people

Example apps with public data • Road traffic accidents • Locrating – schools by Ofsted rating • Where did my tax go? • Compare the Care Home • Day Nurseries • UK Climate projections

Crowdspeak – Parly candidates

ASBOrometer

Scores on the Doors – food hygiene

Facebook crime stats quiz

UK Post Box

Find GPs

Or dentists

Or pharmacies

Other data stores - Guardian

Other data stores – US data.gov

From visualisations

To interactive apps

Grounding information for you..

What can we all learn from this? • Information is beautiful… • Making difficult things easy to understand is worthwhile, useful and profitable • Consider how you can bring alive information for your clients?

What needs to happen next • Getting data out of the geek ghettos to enable people to • interrogate it • play with it • interact with it

So what can I do? • Businesses: Free your data • Developers: Create apps • Customers: Buy and demand apps • All: Lobby to free data

Presentation at: www.stimulationltd.co.uk www.slideshare.net/stimulation Tiffany St James tiffany@stimulationltd.co.uk www.twitter.com/tiffanystjames

Open Data and Apps

by Tiffany St James

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