London: 14 October 2009

The UK Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information (APPSI) has published a report titled: Exploiting government's information assets for the public good

The announcement states:

The Prime Minister has tasked Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt with making much more Public Sector Information (PSI) easily accessible over the web. In parallel, the Shareholder Executive has been studying how best to make available information from Trading Funds in a sustainable way. Both organisations have asked government‟s Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information (APPSI) for suggestions on how to facilitate their work. Since the two tasks interact and success will need both short and long term actions, APPSI has produced a paper entitled Exploiting government's information assets for the public good which sets out a consolidated view by Panel of how best to proceed.

APPSI's key points are:

• The value of PSI to citizens and businesses alike is now widely recognised. The factors which block realisation of this value are no longer technological but rather cultural, policy, institutional and financial ones. We therefore warmly welcome the Making Public Data Public initiative;
• We identify areas where information 'prospecting and harvesting' would be beneficial in the short term. But we also urge that a longer term and prioritised information garnering strategy should be put in place;
• In particular, we identify some 'Core Reference Geographies' which would underpin many activities of the state, its organisations (e.g. emergency services) and businesses and urge that these are made freely available and maintained as a key part of a national information infrastructure;
• We identify some policy changes and other actions which would considerably facilitate successful re-use of PSI;
• We note that the growing use of the new technologies has major ramifications for current government policies and practice applied to Trading Funds, notably in the practicability of some forms of end user licenses.

Related news topics

OPSI: A hot topic!