The document discusses open data and app development. It defines open data as freely available non-personal data like statistics and reports published by the government. The UK government opened a data repository and required departments to publish data to increase transparency, reform the public sector, and provide economic and social benefits. This enabled developers to create apps using public data on topics like traffic accidents, schools, health services, and crime rates. The presentation encourages businesses to release their data, developers to build apps, users to demand apps, and all to advocate for more open data policies.

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

2. 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.

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

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

5. 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

6. 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

7. From this…

8. …To this

9. It looks like this:

11. 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

12. 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

13. Crowdspeak – Parly candidates

14. ASBOrometer

15. Scores on the Doors – food hygiene

16. Facebook crime stats quiz

17. UK Post Box

18. Find GPs

19. Or dentists

20. Or pharmacies

25. Other data stores - Guardian

26. Other data stores – US data.gov

27. From visualisations

28. To interactive apps

29. Grounding information for you..

30. 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?

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

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

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