Baroness Ashton listens to Free Our Data case
As we report in today’s Guardian, in Minister listens to Guardian’s campaign call, we had an off-the-record meeting with Baroness Ashton, who is in charge of public sector information at the Department of Constitutional Affairs – a role that she has had since the Office of Public Sector Information moved from the Cabinet Office to become part of the National Archives near the end of last year.
The meeting was off the record (so we can’t tell you what she said) because the government is still considering its response to the OFT report on PSI, which won’t come out until after the local government elections in May. (We have no idea what the connection of the local elections is to PSI, but let’s let that go.)
One can though get some idea of the concerns that are going on; Baroness Ashton is clearly listening to everyone who feels that the current system isn’t quite working, as well as those who do. She has promised us an attributable briefing once the response to the OFT is published.
One concern we did note though was about how one could be sure, with a free data model, that errors weren’t being introduced in re-use:
Other questions raised familiar objections to the free data idea. One is how to assure the integrity of government data when it is re-used by third parties. While there are technical solutions such as encryption hashes, the answer may be that the government has to learn to let go. After all, in an era of free data, users and commercial competitors will always be able to make their own checks against the original. And free geospatial data could improve the accuracy of sketchmaps produced by bodies such as tourist authorities, perhaps even saving lives.
We can offer an example here: the photo on this page is, apparently, Crown Copyright; and anyone can follow it back to the original, here, to see if we’ve messed around with it. (We haven’t, because we’re simply calling it directly from the government server.) Data re-use with Crown Copyright without cost? It sounds like a good idea to us.
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- Your questions please for Baroness Ashton - and a question for you, the reader (20 March 2007; score: 77.95%)
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March 30th, 2007 at 9:46 am
For a start, the data should be provided without licence, not necessarily for free. Anything on a government website (as long as there is no personal information) should be fair game. The government has a history of excluding uses for political reasons, e.g. excluding marketing, because it is not popular (yet legal and necessary). Thereby government has not been very precise with the definitions. E.g. does “marketing use” include list cleaning, where existing direct marketing lists are updated and wrong names removed?
Any database, and any added value product will always suffer from different government bodies providing the data under many different terms. Even the standardised “Added Value Licence” from the OPSI is often substituted by harsh “Service Level Agreements” that exclude uses beyond the standard licence. Also, non-crown bodies are not covered by it, although the difference is not always entirely clear. The abolition of licences is the first step towards free data. The government can start thinking about providing the data without financial consideration later. However, I believe many re-users like the fact that a legally enforceable agreement exists between the public sector and the re-user. Otherwise any withdrawal of data would have to be considered under judicial review.
This is the position in other European countries, and it is not clear why the UK decided go the route via Crown Copyright to all data. Therefore, politically, the aim of having copyright removed from all data is achievable and needs to be the first step.