IMS_Blog

Bravo for the Guardian’s take on public data. Too long have we sat here jealous of one of the things the US have got right. It is amazing that we should be effectively forced to pay for data that is morally “ours” to start with. It is also quite clear that the publically funded and endorsed collection and collation of such data gives those with such a mandate an enormously unfair advantage, which they are then further forced to squeeze every last drop from. Anybody doubting the grip held on such public data should look no further than the hoops one is made to jump through by the Royal Mail to simply look up a postcode. Having encouraged the public over and over again to use said postcodes (because that makes letter sorting simpler and hence saves money) they then require a registration to actually look one up, so they can restrict the number checked! This is ludicrous even ignoring the fact that those who would look up large numbers of postcodes are probably businesses, who themselves are actually encouraged to use the more logical and parallel numeric encoding to help with sorting. The useless far from street level detail available of the largest scale map available from the Ordinance Survey’s site is another case in point. Come on, give us our data back, as a public service should.