Boris Johnson to open City Hall data

» By thomasscott2323 | the 01-07-2010 at 18:09 | 34 views (20 unique) | 1 comment | Report post!

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Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, is following in the footsteps of Barack Obama and launching a bid to open up the data stored in City Hall to software developers.

Modelled on America’s data.gov website, Johnson has launched data.london.gov.uk and hopes that software developers will develop British “Apps for Democracy” like those that have been so successful in the USA.

Channel 4’s fund, 4iP, will also contribute £200,000 towards the cost of developing applications that will use information that is currently available for topics such as census data, crime attributable to alcohol and deliberate fire incidents. In due course the Mayor hopes that more than 200 topics will be covered by the time of the ‘Datastore’ official launch on January 29, and that the resources will continue to expand.

Mr Johnson launched the event today in a live digital link up with Barack Obama’s Chief Information Officer Aneesh Chopra, who was speaking at CES Government, the conference that runs in parallel with technology show CES 2010, in Las Vegas. Prior to the event he said in a statement “The superb new London 'Datastore' will unleash valuable facts and figures that been languishing for far too long in the deepest recesses of City Hall. I firmly believe that access to information should not just be the preserve of institutions and a limited elite. Data belongs to the people particularly that held by the public sector and getting hold of it should not involve a complex routine of jumping through a series of ever decreasing hoops.”

He also said that the move “will not only increase democracy, but also provide a potential money-spinner for the city's hugely important software development sector." Although projects such as FixMyStreet.com, via which users can report potholes, are among Britain's best-known examples of public service websites, London.data.gov.uk data is also going to be used for apps on social networking sites such as Facebook. The aim is to reach a mass market.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, one of the internet’s founding fathers, is also working with the Government on a national data.gov.uk, which is expected to launch in the next few weeks. The first applications for London's Datastore should appear around the same time, and are likely to initially feature simple maps of trends across London.