New Datastore for London
Jinfo Blog

14th January 2010

By Anne Jordan

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Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, recently launched Datastore (http://data.london.gov.uk), a new initiative to open up information from the Greater London Authority and its functional bodies. Hundreds of data sets about the capital are now available in prototype format. The formal launch is at the end of January 2010 with a larger number of data packages and an improved user interface. Data ranges from the curious – Ambulance Call Outs to Animal Attack Incidents – to the more obviously useful for business information users, such as GLA Sector Employment Projections 2009, giving London employment projections out to 2031. More data packages are to be added on a daily basis, with around 200 scheduled for launch at the end of January 2010. London is not the first city to launch a Datastore. A number of cities in the US have their own data stores, such as DataSF for San Francisco (http://datasf.org/showcase). The purpose of making such data publically available is not only to improve transparency in a city's data, but also to encourage software companies to create applications from that data. The London Datastore website calls on developers to transform the data into Facebook apps, websites or mobile products which people can find useful. Boris Johnson's announcement follows the government's Data.gov.uk open government information initiative announced last autumn, which also called on developers to get involved in shaping what apps, data sources and features a new website should contain. Although not yet publically available, the Data.gov.uk website will open a large number of existing government datasets in a similar vein to the US government’s Data.gov web portal (http://www.data.gov), launched last year as a central repository for citizens to gain access to government data. In December 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced "Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government", setting out how Government will improve public service outcomes at a time of fiscal restraint. A major theme of this is to radically open up data and public information for direct user access – and encouraging others to spend the time developing ways of disseminating the data. However, increased access to public data is a bonus for info pros, and hardly surprising to see government trying to appear more transparent following last year's MP expenses scandal.

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