Data Day

Postcodes: Adam Crozier letter

From MP Tom Watson.

From me:

I will follow this issue with interest: thank you for raising it. And for pursuing it further.

I think a nice balance between sympathetic commercial realism and community challenge on matters of 'public' data.

My website has a postcode location facility to help, amongst other things, people to locate each other to facilitate reuse swaps, etc.

I think I paid for that, a long while ago.

Now many folk, especially new registrants, are complaining that their postcodes 'don't work'. I'm guessing boundary changes or additions.

Now as a commercial business I can see how things that take money to create need to be compensated, but I do get interested when the ways such data are gleaned are less clearly defined.

And, as stated above, when there is a clear public benefit to having access to information about themselves.

I believe the Guardian has been on this case also for quite a while: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/free-our-data

Taking a tip from another poster, as Junkk.com also finds itself followed in, but (until now, for monetary reasons, poorly serving) the USA, this is pretty significant, and cheering:

Federal Register in XML

The Know People

This looks like a good thing for bad times: Turn to Google Maps for flood updates

As does this.

What does not, is this: '... a useful point to wonder whether information on flooding that is already collated by various arms of government should be made more freely available to members of the public. After all, it was only a couple of weeks ago that property site OnOneMap, which uses Google Maps as its engine, got into a battle over the flood data it was offering browsers. Because the mapping data showing flood risk is owned by the Environment Agency, they were forced to remove it.'

Just so's I get this straight...

There is public information, paid for by the public, that can be of help (or made to be) to the public, and it's ring-fenced 'not for the public's benefit' by quango turf defences?