UK PSI Policy news roundup!
The UK policy on the re-use of public sector information appears to vary dependent upon which part of the PSI re-use value chain one sits. The following news topics provide a flavour of UK PSI news during December 2009.
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The Civil Service Network has published a policy brief titled: Mapping the Future.
The policy brief refers to the following topics:
- Public Sector Information
- UK Prime Minister’s Announcement 4th December 2009
- The Cambridge study
- Trading Funds
- The UK Ordnance Survey
- The UK Met Office
- data.gov.uk
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The UK Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information published a news item titled: Civil Service World article on Public Sector Information. The announcement states:
“This article considers the announcements at the end of last month, when the Prime Minister, Treasury Minister Liam Byrne and world-wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee announced that Ordnance Survey would start giving away some of its data for free.
The appointment of high-profile advisers does not signify a change of policy, says Carol Tullo, head of the Office of Public Sector Information – the regulator in this area, and the policy lead. The difference now “is that this open data policy is at the heart of the government’s strategy – for society’s benefit and for economic benefit, to drive innovation.”
The article sets out the arguments for, and against the release of free public data. Sir Tim Berners-Lee sees it clearly as a social and economic benefit to society. He puts forward his argument on a very practical level, pointing out that “When you publish how government and public services are working you enable the public to help put them back on track, you enable the public to point out where things could be better.” He claims that free data will change people’s lives in the same way that the internet has done.
The argument against free data is put forward by some quasi-commercial public sector bodies that pay their way by charging for use of the data sets they collect and maintain; and the Government’s Trading Funds are also sensitive about this issue because they must make at least 50% of their income through selling the services or goods they produce.
As well as pointing to the twists and turns of the OS debate, the article asserts that the specifics - questions such as what constitutes a ‘mid-scale’ map and how much central government funding will be provided to support its free distribution - are to be thrashed out between now and April next year.
The article can be accessed in three parts: [in due course]”
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At the sixth APPSI annual conference the presentation titled: Making Money from PSI –A practitioner’s view presented by Mark Houghton, Head of Information Commercialisation at the Environment Agency states on slide 7:
“Some thoughts… for Q&A
- We need clarity on recent announcements
- We want the commercial sector to disseminate our information in user friendly ways
- We operate a wholesale model, we want the maximum number of users
- Our role in the overall information market
- We may have a different opinion, but we believe a valid opinion”
The presentation titled: Developments outside central government and how we can foster them in local authorities and the NHS, presented by Michael Jennings and Carol Tullo states on slide 5:
“Story so far…Lack of progress on availability of information
- Despite efforts by OPSI, organisations have done little formally on public sector information re-use:Big pressures –services and capacity and resources
- Little interest –50% of public not interested; 25% interested negatively; 25% positively
- Big obstacles –licensing and costing barriers and lack of consistent approach (PSI Re-use, EIR, INSPIRE, FoI, Tax -charge spectrum)
- Little appetite –experience on geographic information – OS, IPSA - and Dr Foster”
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The UK Cabinet Office Digital Engagement Blog published an article titled: Met Office releases first Weather Widget
“The Met Office generates vast quantities of data on the way to delivering forecasts and climate predictions. Much of this data (more than 60Gb per day) is distributed already in some way — either to other meteorological and climate organisations, or to people for whom the weather can have an impact. The Met Office website is also very popular, especially at times of significant weather events, such as the snow of February 2009 when there were nearly 20 million visits to the site. This year the Met Office has significantly expanded capabilities to distribute data with advisories, warnings and alerts available as RSS feeds, email, Twitter (and, via Twitter, SMS), and a range of platform specific tools such as those for Google, Firefox and Windows Vista/7. Forecast information will also be using these channels early next year. See here for more information.
The interpretation of weather data can be a highly skilled task, particularly if that data is computer generated model outputs or observation data such as satellite or radar information. Research suggests many requests for data are not to re-use or add value to the data in any way, but simply to visualise it. Many websites would like to offer their users local or contextual weather and, until now, the only choice available to them has been to develop their own web-based weather visualisation applications based on a subscribed weather data feed. The Met Office will continue to supply weather data and indeed plans to widen the catalogue of data available to the general public over the coming months, but this is often not what website owners want.””
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The UK Guardian Free Our Data campaign published a topic titled: UEA CRU climate data is a free data issue too. The topic refers to the University of East Anglia’s climate data. The Free Our Data topic ends with the statement:
“Paying for public data: it’s never a good idea. Especially when it creates problems like this.”
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The UK National Archives (TNA) has announced that further improvements have been made to the National Archives web site. The Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) is part of the National Archives and the phased changes to the National Archives web site are part of the plan to phase out the current OPSI web site and integrate the public sector information materials into the Information Management section of the National Archives web site.
The announcement states:
This latest stage in the redesign of our website follows the success of the new education section, launched in September, and the corporate pages launched last month. We'll be revealing our improved information management section next year.
APPSI Reports on 6th Conference
Locus Responds to UK PSI Policy Announcements
Free BGS Data – OpenGeoscience
Postcode data to be free in 2010
UK plans to increase PSI re-use!
Exceptions to Marginal Cost Pricing
National Archives – Loss of OPSI Brand?
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