open data and apps

Mobile Apps World 2010

Open Data & App Development

Tiffany St JamesWednesday 20 October, 2010

What do we mean by open data

• Open data is a philosophy and practice

requiring that certain data be freely

available to everyone, without restrictions

from copyright, patents or other

mechanisms of control.

And our govt means open data by...

• Non-personal data

• Information not code

• Figures, statistics

• Excel, tables, csv files

• Every report published

Why is this important?

• Transparency

• Public sector reform

• Social benefits

• Economic benefits

• Global leadership positioning

What did the UK Govt do?

• Opened up a repository for data

• Made departments publish data

• Created an online community of developers

• Made ‘linked data’ a reality

Why is this world class?

• A way of marking up data for the web

• Enables concepts to be linked together

• Letting people walk through the data by

concept - e.g. data that is about:

• Schools

• With a budget over £3m

• In South East of England

From this…

…To this

It looks like this:

How did they do it?

• Work with people who were best in class

• Establish processes for release

• Build a back end

• Soft launch

• Blogger briefings

• Created visualisations to show people

Example apps with public data

• Road traffic accidents

• Locrating – schools by Ofsted rating

• Where did my tax go?

• Compare the Care Home

• Day Nurseries

• UK Climate projections

Crowdspeak – Parly candidates

ASBOrometer

Scores on the Doors – food hygiene

Facebook crime stats quiz

UK Post Box

Find GPs

Or dentists

Or pharmacies

Other data stores - Guardian

Other data stores – US data.gov

From visualisations

To interactive apps

Grounding information for you..

What can we all learn from this?

• Information is beautiful…

• Making difficult things easy to understand is

worthwhile, useful and profitable

• Consider how you can bring alive

information for your clients?

What needs to happen next

• Getting data out of the geek ghettos to

enable people to

• interrogate it

• play with it

• interact with it

So what can I do?

• Businesses: Free your data

• Developers: Create apps

• Customers: Buy and demand apps

• All: Lobby to free data

Presentation at:www.stimulationltd.co.uk

www.slideshare.net/stimulation

Tiffany St James

tiffany@stimulationltd.co.uk

www.twitter.com/tiffanystjames