Data is a Product

It's finally happened. After the rise and fall of empires, the UK has created a republic of the people. No, we haven't asked the Windsors to move on - what's actually happened is Open Addresses. For anyone who hasn't read this blog before, I'll give you a one paragraph overview of the problem we've faced.. The UK is seen as a leader in Open Data. However, as virtually every decision made by government and businesses involves a 'place', the lack of an open list of places (an address dataset) has been a major problem. We have lots of commercial datasets such as Royal Mail PAF, Ordnance Survey AddressBase and a variety of local gazetteers and other datasets owned by government bodies. While choice is good, in this case the choice and (more importantly) the cost have created issues with uptake of accurate data, problems with matching and in short, chaos. Now, finally, the issues caused by a lack of a free, open and accurate address source for gov...

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll probably know that I live in East London and have a passing interest in Open Data(!). After getting to know the guys at Locatable during my visits to the Open Data Institute and Open Government Partnership conference, they asked me to write a guest blog on my personal experience of the property market in East London. The result of this is here and as always reflects my personal opinions (based upon some basic evidence) and in no way reflects upon the views of Locatable or my employer. Anyway, I hope it's interesting! While you're there, take a good look at Locatable as this company represents all that is good about open data and owning your information.

As the title indicates, it's been far too long since I last wrote a post. Terrible I know. A lot has changed since my last post. I've moved to a new role responsible for B2B Marketing products. My focus is now very much on helping SMEs grow and cut the risks associated with this. This lends itself superbly to the aims of the Open Data movement which is reaching a major milestone this week. On Tuesday 29th October, the Open Data Institute held their first annual summit to celebrate the first 12 months of this superb organisation. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend but followed the event closely on Twitter using the tag #ODIsummit. The major announcement made was the formation of 13 global 'nodes' to help further the cause and bring the collaborative way of working between data owners, start-ups and society to a wider audience. These new nodes include two national trials in the USA & Canada, eight regional/city nodes in Dubai, Chicago, North Carolina, Par...

On Tuesday, I was lucky enough to attend the official launch of the Open Data Institute (ODI) at their HQ in Shoreditch, London. For the uninitiated, the ODI has been championed by founder of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and eminent data scientist Prof. Nigel Shadbolt with the aim to create a world-leading centre of open innovation for government, academics and businesses of all sizes. With support from the UK government of £10 million over 5 years, the ODI have wasted no time in recruiting a cracking leadership team including the founder of green supply chain pioneers AMEE (Gavin Starks) and my Open Data User Group colleague Jeni Tennison. The ODI have a few simple aims which can be summarised as: - Creating education programmes to train the next generation of data scientists. - Assist and advise the public sector on the best ways to release and use open data. - Work with small & large businesses to improve skills, foster innovation and boost economic gain in the field o...