Technology | 2010.01.07
In praise of… priceless information
"Know where to find the information and how to use it" – a tip Einstein believed to be "the secret of success". Britons traditionally struggled with this advice as much of their data came shrouded in state secrecy – and much of the rest came attached to off-putting price tags. But after Barack Obama launched data.gov to unlock all manner of federal information, the UK has decided to play catch-up. The Ordnance Survey\'s tight copyrights mean other bureaucracies need costly permission even to map parliamentary constituencies. But Gordon Brown has resolved that many maps will go into the public domain, and the Royal Mail\'s jealously guarded postcode database is heading the same way. A free superstore of official facts and figures will open soon, but yesterday it was Boris Johnson who stole the march, with a website thrusting the Greater London authority\'s statistical secrets out into the open. Even in this age of the FoI request , there is a world of difference between uncovering unknown unknowns by chancing upon the right question and knowing that the numbers that matter will all be released automatically. As the so-called semantic web takes hold, cataloguing content in wizardly ways, the scope for linking between different public databases explodes, transforming their potential to enlighten and inform. Information is priceless, and removing the price tag will help to establish which policies work, and will strengthen the arm of the people in their ongoing struggle to hold to account the powers that be.
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