If you get free data, what will you do with it?
Our challenge to you: if you get free data, what will you do with it?
The question has some urgency because if you can think of what you’d like to do with data from the Land Registry, Companies House or the Met Office, then you could be in line to be the first to benefit from it – and show the benefits of making more data free.
The Cambridge report noted three sets of data that could be made free with minimal revenue impact: Land Registry, Companies House, and Met Office.
Let’s revisit them, so you can think what to do with them.
For Land Registry, the analysis only looks at “Property Data Services” – which are the ‘Property Price Data’ and ‘Polygons’, whose respective revenues were £893k, the majority of which was from a bulk form of the product, and £405k. (That compares to Land Registry’s total revenues of XXX, 86% of which comes from compulsory registrations.)
Those, it should be noted, are tiny compared to its revenues. Land Registry’s fee income in 2006/7 was £474million (in 2005/6, £395m). Its costs are very high, but it still had an operating surplus of £96m – nearly as large as Ordnance Survey’s entire revenues.
The reason: you’re obliged to tell LR when you buy or sell land or put a charge (such as a mortgage) on registered land.
The property data could surely be used for some imaginative analysis – though note that Land Registry bans the use of its data for unsolicited mailshots. (An interesting question is how, if one moved to a free data model, one would spot uses which broke rules like that. Would you drop the rule, or include intentionally fake data which would tip you off if you received a mailshot addresses to it?)
Companies House is next: £72m revenue, again almost all from obligatory registrations. (Although search is the most profitable area – as you’d expect: it’s easier to search data than to accept and check it.) Unfortunately most of the data there is marked confidential in the analysis – but again, one can imagine that it might be useful to find people who are persistent directors of companies that aren’t acting lawfully…
Finally there’s the Met Office. Can anyone think what you’d do with a lot of weather data?
More analysis and suggestions of how to use these three organisations’ output data – if it were free – are welcome.
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- Welcome to the Free Our Data campaign blog (13 March 2006; score: 0%)
- About the Free Our Data blog (13 March 2006; score: 0%)
- Terrible design? Yes, sorry (15 March 2006; score: 0%)
- Ordnance Survey replies to "Give us back our crown jewels" (15 March 2006; score: 0%)
- Today in The Guardian: readers respond to the start of the campaign (16 March 2006; score: 0%)
April 21st, 2008 at 2:12 pm
“Finally there’s the Met Office. Can anyone think what you’d do with a lot of weather data?”
The answer to this question is simple.
Use observational data (radar and station obs) for UK nowcasting and model output to produce weather forecasts for the UK and globally. Of course this would put the user on a commercial collision course with the UKMO’s commercial forecasting prodcuts!
Output from the UKMOs Unified global and various regional and mesoscale models could be used to initialise ones own high resolution regional or mesoscale models.
April 22nd, 2008 at 3:57 pm
We run http://www.ourproperty.co.uk which currently provides free property price data to the public. We buy this data from the Land Registry and give it away for free to all our users.
If we could get access to the polygon data for free then I think there are many innovative products we could give to our users.
- Building plot finder – Identifying areas that might be suitable as building plots, analysing the amount of garden space available in each record.
- Property Meta Data – When properties are advertised for sale in the UK, they rarely show the size (in sqm or sqft) of the building or it’s land. We could attempt to derive this meta data from the polygons, and therefore build a web service to show the area of every property (and it’s land) in the UK.
- Timeline – Showing how an area is developed over time, perhaps overlaying an animation on a Google map, that shows the change in use through the years.
- Building alerts – Currently we offer free sales alerts, whereby we can e-mail our users when a property is sold near them (or a postcode of their choice). If we had access to the polygon data, this could be added in, so that we can also alert them when a property is modified.
- Property history – We keep a sales history at the moment for each property, but we could also add a history of all the plans. The Land Registry have this in a paper form, but I don’t believe they offer it online currently. Innovation in the private sector would mean this feature would be built a lot more quickly than if we were to wait for the government.
April 29th, 2008 at 9:26 am
We run http://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/ which provides free information for walkers visiting & living in the Scottish Highlands.
We currently have 1:50k OS maps with every route (over 450 of them) marked on through the Multimap Open API – however the continuation of this service relies on the generosity of Multimap / Microsoft with no guarantees.
If OS data becomes free we will provide 1:25k OS mapping with the routes marked. In its paper version 1:25k is the best selling scale of OS maps for walkers but currently to our knowledge does not exist anywhere on the web except on the OS’s own website. The extra detail should improve safety and ease of navigation for walkers by showing the routes more clearly. This might not sound a huge improvement but if you ask our users they will tell you otherwise!
We also want to use OS-based slippy maps as the complete navigation system of our site, with all b&bs, self-catering, campsites etc. marked on it, making the ultimate interactive map of Scotland for walkers. This will require alot of development work which we can’t invest in without being sure of being able to have free access to the mapping tiles in future.