Comments on: Impossible possibilities – A wishlist for linked data

By: Last week’s links « Policy and Performance

Last week’s links « Policy and Performance — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:07:47 +0000

[...] Pezholio » Blog Archive » Impossible possibilities – A wishlist for linked data Setting out some architecture possibilities which would make turning open data into linked data easier. [...]

By: Chris Brierley

Chris Brierley — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:56:58 +0000

Heh, that was the intended datasource for the lat/long

By: Pez

Pez — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:03:12 +0000

No problem, happy to help! Might be worth referencing the postcodes you do have against the Free the Postcode database (http://www.freethepostcode.org/), so you’ve got a load of lat/lngs to add to your existing data.

By: Chris Brierley

Chris Brierley — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:33:04 +0000

I’m actually working on a project to gather UK postcode data, and release as an open source dataset. The plan is currently to gather street address data, to avoid legal issues the data is gathered by people submitting postcodes and street addresses that they know themselves (home, work etc).

The idea was to then have an API which can be queried to return the relevant address, which would allow web applications to get the data without needing to licence the PAF.

The database is being redesigned to add some new features, mainly the latitude/longitude of each postcode. You have given me some great ideas to include! I will be adding tags to allow people to specify things like police authorities and local authorities. Thanks for sharing the wishlist.

By: PaulG

PaulG — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:57:38 +0000

That it be mandated that suppliers to local government publish their data in the form of centrally controlled, and recognised data sets, or get £ penalized.

That councils make that data (less the personal stuff) available online or ditto, get their grant cut.

By: Graham

Graham — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:28:50 +0000

Yeah, there’s still that big issue of data-management (see http://bit.ly/1FGLm0), but reckon merging/comparing personal local data to aggregate local data would be a big win… One for Google, probably

By: Pez

Pez — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:49:54 +0000

Cool idea, but I can see the Daily Mail headlines already – “Government Spies giving YOUR data away” – really cool, and I think it’s got legs, but I can’t see the privacy-at-any-cost brigade being happy with it!

By: Graham

Graham — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:46:40 +0000

Dear Father Christmas, I would like to be able to construct “personal space identifiers” – say, manually, through GPs, etc – that would map to geographic identifiers such as postcodes, e.g. “exmosis/home : WS13 6YY, exmosis/work : WS13 6YZ”, or other identifiers such as latitude and longitude.

It sounds a bit FOAFy, but could be useful as a) a way to look up locations-relating-to-people without getting the address from them, b) mapping personal data to wider data, with a context, e.g. aggregate all data tagged with a postcode, OR just people who have “work” tagged to a particular postcode. This might be useful if data is relevant to particular functions/times of day/what-have-you.

I’m still thinking this through, but I kind of like the idea for some reason. Also I have no idea how this relates to the above. Yet.