Free Our Data: sessions this Thursday and Saturday, in Manchester and London
The debate continues over free data: I’ll (Charles Arthur) be appearing this Thursday at Manchester University, with the National Centre for e-Social Science.
The Manchester event is in the evening, starting at 6.30pm: I’m on a panel with Peter Elias, Professor of Labour Economy, University of Warwick and Strategic Advisor (Data Resources) to the ESRC; Duncan MacNiven, the Registrar General for Scotland; Jil Matheson, director of Census, Demographic and Regional Statistics at the Office for National Statistics; and Neil Ackroyd: Director of Data Collection and Management, Ordnance Survey.
The topic:
Should social researchers have unlimited access to the data that Government collects about individual UK citizens? Would the benefits of better evidence on which to base social policy outweigh concerns about privacy? Experts from academia and government will offer their views and respond to questions from the audience.
With those attendees, it should be quite an event..
On Saturday, I’ll be on a panel at 11am as part of the Open Knowledge Foundation conference in London
with Ed Parsons, until recently the chief technology officer of Ordnance Survey, and Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap.
Read more on that, including directions etc, at the OScon site.
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- OBE for Robert Barr, free data campaigner (31 December 2007; score: 37.54%)
- "There's no economic incentive to free data - until we produce one" (11 May 2006; score: 30.68%)
- A chance to tell OPSI what we want (4 January 2008; score: 30.44%)
- Digital engagement, widening and public data getting analysed... in private (30 October 2009; score: 24.06%)
- Does this sound familiar? Virtual London removed from Second Life - at Ordnance Survey request (20 November 2007; score: 19.71%)
March 15th, 2007 at 3:39 am
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March 16th, 2007 at 9:25 am
I was at the session on Thursday (last night) and whilst it was probably too wide-ranging (due mainly to the raising of identity card issues) it made a number of interesting points but never quite cut into the meat of things. Many disingenuous comments were flung about (there is, for example a world of difference between choosing to give data to Tesco and being unable to choose to have it shared between goverment departments; a world of difference between a national identity database and a national identity card) but it was a ninteresting evening nonethless. What it did show, is that selective examples can make for a compelling argument. It is, for example, one thing to see why costs should be recouped on something such as the genealogy website (Scotland) but quite another to ask whether this is the type of polished product that a publicly funded organisation should be building in the first place. Is it, in summary, the duty of these data collection agencies to collect data or to develop applications with it that goes way beyond the point of merely making the data available.
March 16th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Of relevance to those meetings (and more widely) is teh recent prublciation from a JISC funded project. The report, entitled Designing a licensing strategy for sharing and re-use of geospatial data in the academic sector. is available here and should be compulsory reading for all interested in promoting an open debate about OSGB’s position.
March 16th, 2007 at 9:52 am
I was at the event. I thought the most interesting point was that people seemed to be saying “Free our Data….in a format I want”. I just can’t see how this ties in with casual assertions that digital distribution is cost free. It takes enormous amounts of efforts for researchers to extract data, and time and money to put it into required formats. One person made the example of recieving data in pdf format, but it was required in raw XML. However, other people would prefer PDFs, some would require it in RSS, some in CSV, some in SQL etc.
March 19th, 2007 at 10:25 am
Charles … I don’t believe that the format is a major issue. Or at least only for parties that require some manner of ‘finished product’ … eg for printing out directly. This would clearly be unreasonable, and everyone’s finished product is different.
Some manner of standardised raw format, eg flat file, or maybe XML is the only reasonable format. And then it would be up the whoever wants to use the data to manipulate, format and display in whatever way they choose.
Ian