UK Government Open Data
Following in the footsteps of the US (http://www.data.gov/), Australia (http://data.australia.gov.au/) and countless others, the UK government have launched their central repository of public data – http://data.gov.uk/.
At first glance it looks well organised. They’ve probably gone a bit overboard with Web 2.0, by including:
- 2.0 colours
- Blog
- RSS feeds
- Bookmark and share tags
- Forum
- Wiki
That aside, the important part is the data. You can search by keywords, tags, or browse all the datasets. As at writing there were 2879 datasets, a high number compared to Australia’s 70 and the US’s 937. Are they quality? Well, not really.
Take an example of the Alcohol profile data sets. There are 22 ‘data sets’ which have different stats and different groups, eg one data set for males and one dataset for females. This doesn’t promote resuse. It gets worse. Click on a feed and there’s a link to another site for the description which claims “Note that this website does not hold the actual datasets, instead linking to other websites from which the data is available.”. OK, so where is the data? Well that’s hosted here (can link from data.gov.uk or the other site) but that’s not a download link. Still looking for the data … getting irritable .. ok so there’s a “Data Download” tab on the site. Let’s click it – that will probably give us everything we need for the original category (“Alcohol-attributable hospital admission, females”). But no … four excel files to download that don’t match the description. Let’s take a punt and click the first one. Might be in the right place now – there are 23 sheets which may or may not be related to the 22 datasets in the gov search. There is a sheet called “Alc Spec HES – Females” so I think we’re in the right place, but it’s just so Excel. To reuse this data I have to go through every sheet, add additional fields to represent the breaks, remove columns, tidy up the column titles, and put in a delimited format.
Maybe if they had spent as much time on the data as they had on web 2.0 it would enable the “innovation” they want to promote, but for now it’s just a glorified search engine.
