Ed Parsons, ex-Ordnance Survey: ‘data belongs to citizens’
Ed Parsons, who left OS at the end of December, has an interesting post following his speech to the e-Government awards about “the potential impact of web 2.0 approaches and the development of mash-up applications to future e-Government service”. (We’d love to see the notes from the speech, Ed, or even a post about it..)
In his post, he points out that
a perfect example of what I was suggesting as a future approach was announced yesterday by the US Environmental Protection Agency who are taking their first steps by publishing the locations of some contaminated land sites in XML of their website, with the specific intention of allowing citizens to analyse the data themselves. Of course raw data has always been more available in the US and I not getting into that debate… the difference here is that by publishing data in XML the EPA are opening up the data for people to manipulate using their own lightweight applications.
I’ll just give you some of the text from that News.com story, because it’s worth quoting directly:
The pilot piece of that effort, posted early Wednesday morning, is a single XML file containing information on about 1,600 locales relegated to the Superfund National Priorities List. As required by Congress since 1980, the EPA uses that list to locate, investigate and clean up the worst-offending landfills, chemical plants, radiation sites and other areas known or suspected of releasing contaminants, pollutants and other hazardous substances.
By the end of the year, the EPA hopes to expand its offerings to include data on at least 100,000 sites from across its many different regulatory programs, including hazardous waste storage and treatment sites, air pollution trends and toxic chemical releases.
And that single XML file is only 146KB, at present, and you can even feed back on data points you think are wrong.
Now, with some talk about people in London wondering about radioactivity beneath a potential Olympic site, wouldn’t we all be glad of a similar XML file here? (This is the point I was making to Steven Feldman in the comments of the previous post: while it’s good to have websites with data, what makes the whole system mesh is XML feeds, so computer can talk to computer, which can be controlled by person who filters or decides what to cross-correlate; not just making data available on a website to someone who has to laboriously cross-match sites together. The latter is web 1.0; the former, web 2.0.)
Anyway… Ed concludes
we should not forget that they are simple and cheap approaches to providing greater levels of information to the citizen by allowing the citizen to carry out the analysis themselves.
Another key point I made was that the next generation of citizens, “Generation Y� if you like, are in many ways more open to sharing data, having grown up defining they characters on-line on mySpace and Bebo than today’s. However this willingness to share data with others, even government? comes from the fact that as authors their “own� their own data and are free to modify, correct and update it.
For anyone delivering the citizen services of the future here is an important lesson – it is NOT your data, it is the citizens’ and they must feel true ownership of it.
You know what? We agree. And since we own those data… we should have unfettered access to them. [Update: Ed clarifies his definition in the comments for this post: he means citizen-*provided* data such as names and addresses.]
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- Ed Parsons, formerly of Ordnance Survey, now of Google (8 April 2007; score: 23.18%)
- Ed Parsons blogs his thoughts on the RSA debate (19 July 2006; score: 20.73%)
- Ed Parsons to leave Ordnance Survey: but why? (5 December 2006; score: 19.68%)
- PDFs are bad for open government, says Sunlight Foundation in US (7 November 2009; score: 19.4%)
- A quick roundup to start the new year (1 January 2009; score: 19.17%)
January 26th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Good discussion guys, just to clarify my point about the ownership of data relates only to the data the citizen chooses to contribute themselves – e.g. my Telephone number or Address
Ultimately rather than the government building big centralised databases, as citizens we might create our own on-line repositories of xml structured information we have chosen to share – well its good to have a dream !
ed
January 26th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
OK, Ed, have clarified that in the post. Though of course we don’t choose our telephone number or address, and if you make a planning application then your name and address will be made available through the local authority anyway.
Yes, repositories of XML info would be good – though it helps to have an overarching structure to weld it to. Such as grid references or a Mastermap or..
January 26th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Good old Lat/Long ?
January 27th, 2007 at 2:58 am
In a world where poostcodes are chargeable giving a directy lat long makes sense. Now if only postcode to lat long data was available….
In fact given that the post o9ffice seem to want to make it hard for me to reconcille post codes to addresses I’m tempted to stop using postcodes just as a point o0f principle….
January 27th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
I’m always a bit amused by this monolith labeled Government. The Government is Us…..we the Citizens!! We elect The Government, we pay their salaries and their employment benefits with our taxes which are subtracted from our pay. Therefore, information which is created by The Government basically and authoritatively belongs to the Citizens and The Government is obligated to provide seamless and unimpeded access to it.
I feel that there is nothing more anti-democratic than the notion that public information is somehow sacrosanct and must be withheld at all costs from the citizens who pay for it.
Am I the only one who feels that the default should always be open access and transparency at no cost? This truly is the baseline argument for the Free Our Data campaign. The Government is its Citizens.
Judy
February 2nd, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Population estimates and forecasts are used to plan for public and private services delivery including education, health, transportation, housing etc. In British Columbia Canada, methods and data are used that citizens are not allowed to see.
Nonetheless, decisions on whether to open or close hospitals or schools etc. are based on numbers that are sometimes simply made up by government officials.
Public scrutiny of the population estimation and forecasting data and procedures would help improve the models and techniques used. Improved understanding of the strengths and weaknesses in the numbers generated would improve peoples ability to plan and prepare for the future.
February 15th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
I used to think information management was more organised and information was being integrated far more than what I now think. It seems so obviously the right thing to do for government and to improve public services and our environment. I appreciate that there is some need for security and control over access to information. But I agree with my friend and mentor Stan Openshaw when he suggested that not integrating and analysing data for epidemiology is wrong – he actually went further and called it “Crime” and that those preventing the work were accomplices and also criminal… I know we can never prove that we could have saved lives by being able to do the work with better data and access… If we the public are the government as Judy suggests, then we want access to the data to help do the work.
February 26th, 2007 at 12:43 am
Writing as someone who — a long time ago — was paid to sit at a digitising tablet and trace this stuff, I have to say that I am deeply suspicious of this OS-focussed campaign. Where exactly is the lack of transparency on the OS’s part? One pays a fee for a service in the same way as I was paid to click and code; what is wrong with that? Sure, it would be nice if ‘the citizen’ (whatever that might mean in the the good ol’ U of K) could get her data for nought, but how many of us are running GIS systems in our bedrooms? And how many businesses would love to get their data for free? Such are the benefits for big business and so slim are the advantages for Joe Bloggs that one has to wonder whether someone has been ‘got at’. Unless you know better …
February 26th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Well, One-Time Digitiser, we’ve explained our purpose many times in articles (though looking around, perhaps not well enough on this site. Time for a revamp!)
The lack of transparency isn’t the (whole) problem – though it’s not clear how much the OS charges itself for the data it uses to draw maps. The OS acts as data collector and distributor but also as a value-added reseller, which must mean a conflict of interest.
It’s like building roads. We pay taxes for our roads because having a useful number of them helps wider commerce and things like ambulances and police and deliveries. Would you prefer to have to pay a toll every time you need a road or to drive down a motorway? Odd how people don’t seem to be liking that idea for roads, yet everyone thinks that’s how public sector information – the real target of this campaign – should be “pay per click” in precisely that way.
If businesses could get the data for free, there would be more businesses, competing on quality of their products built on that – like delivery companies competing to deliver, using public-tax-funded roads.
Joe |(and Jane) Bloggs benefits by (a) employment from those companies (b) economic spinoffs from those companies.
I really object to the phrase “someone has been got at”. It’s such a lazy ad hominem slur, which people use to ignore the quality of someone’s argument. If you’re scared of the argument, say so. Don’t use insults.
March 1st, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Regarding the specific case of public access to environmental data, European governments are obliged to provide them in the most adequate format:
Public authorities should make environmental information available in the form or format requested by an applicant unless it is already publicly available in another form or format or it is reasonable to make it available in another form or format. In addition, public authorities should be required to make all reasonable efforts to maintain the environmental information held by or for them in forms or formats that are readily reproducible and accessible by electronic means.
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32003L0004:EN:HTML
March 8th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Ruben writes….
“Regarding the specific case of public access to environmental data, European governments are obliged to provide them in the most adequate format:”
This is true, but in the UK this idea is hobbled by the endemic use of Ordnance Survey data by LAs and national government. OS data (to which Crown Copyright applies) is licensed to users. It is one of the terms of the licence that any product, hardcopy or digital which has used licensed OS data in its creation cannot be redistributed for free or finacial benefit without permission of the OS (which invaribaly demands royalties). Perveresly this includes products that do not include any OS data in them.
For instance, if local government produces a drawings for a highways scheme that used OS digital mapping within a GIS as a background layer, even if the drawings produced by LG do not contain any OS provided information, under the terms of the OS license they may not be redistributed.
The current terms of the OS information licensing allow the IS to maintain an unfair commercial advantage and a stranglehold over the use and distribution of Geospatial information of all kinds within the UK. On this basis alone they should be refered to the EU body concerned with fair trading and anti-competitive practices.
March 8th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
One-time Digitiser writes…
” Sure, it would be nice if ‘the citizen’ (whatever that might mean in the the good ol’ U of K) could get her data for nought, but how many of us are running GIS systems in our bedrooms?”
Me for one…!
Advanced and powerful geographic information systems no longer cost thousands or tens of thousands of pounds a license making them only affordable to business. Very advanced and powerful modern GISs comparable in fuctionality to the very expensive legacy GIS’s available are now available for less than £75.00 per license, (eg http://www.manifold.net/) making them as affordable to the masses as Microsoft Word or other popular home or business applications. There is now absolutely no reason why members of the general public cannot explore, use and benefit from geographic information, be it of the UK or elsewhere.
There is clearly and appetite to be able to do so as witnessed by the wide usage of Google Earth or Maps by many to create mash-ups (although there are a whole load of hidden legal issues about if doing so). Use of GIS even if it is only at alow level of expertise, is the next step up the learning curve from using Google Earth.
March 13th, 2007 at 9:14 am
Ed
just thought I’d tell you that a petition has been registered on the Number 10 site with regards to Address ownsership:-
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/freeaddresses/
March 13th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Me
Not sure I agree completly with the wording, but I would agree we need stronger political leadership to establish a single address database once and for all, and I really don’t mind which one it is…
March 13th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
[...] As noted in this comment elsewhere on the blog, there’s now a No.10 petition to stop the address madness: [...]
March 20th, 2007 at 10:12 am
Just to let you know… around the time the mentioned petition was undergoing approval, I had also added a petition for the freedom of UK Ordnance Survey data…
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Free-UK-Map-Data/