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...

Hi all, As regular readers will know, I have a hobby: Open Data. As a member of the Open Data User Group I work with a like-minded community to gather requests and produce business cases to encourage public bodies to release more of their data to benefit UK PLC and society. So far, we've had some successes and have also published our first tranche of business cases for datasets such as the VAT Register, river centre lines and historic Met Office observations. These can all be found here and I'd encourage you to comment on them to add your support and further evidence to get this data made available to everyone, for free. Most important of all, we are pushing the UK Government to make available an Open Address Register for the UK. Currently, a number of files exist which are managed and licensed commercially by the likes of the Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey. If you know anything about my day job at Experian QAS, you'll also know that I have an intimate knowledge ...

Hello there! As some of you may know, I'm a member of the Open Data User Group that's been set up to help the UK Government understand the requirements for more public owned data to be released to all. One of the most common requests received by us and various public bodies is for an open address file. Today, many organisations use Royal Mail PAF or other files from the likes of the Ordnance Survey. Most of these cost money and have various license conditions attached. On top of this, the fact that there are lots of alternatives is plainly confusing. Today, the Open Data User Group have called for the Open release of Royal Mail PAF, OS AddressBase Plus and the National Street Gazetteer to form the backbone of an open and accurate national address register for the UK. More information on our work can be found on the Guardian and the Governments' Open Data site. I'm sure this will kick off a fascinating debate and hopefully will lead to changes in the address da...