Pezholio

Well, it’s been an exciting few months for the open data movement, with the future of the Ordnance Survey and geographical data going out to consultation and data.gov.uk being launched, but imagine my horror when I finally received a response to the petition I started to make postcode data free to non-profits. The full text [...]

As some of you have have seen, Sue Cameron of the Financial times has written a confused and desperate sounding article about the government’s recent announcement to open up the postcode dataset for public reuse.
As the FT doesn’t have any commenting functionality (my biggest bugbear with newspaper websites), I’ve drafted a letter to the [...]

Now, I’ve been banging on about local government open data for a while, I’ve been opening up various datasets on the Lichfield District Council website and generally evangelising to anyone who will listen (and even to some who won’t!)
This JFDI publish-everything-you’ve-got-in-a-database-just-because-you-can approach is all well and good if you’re a techy like me, but there’s [...]

It’s been a few weeks now since I posted my first foray into the Edubase dataset, and since then, there’s been a few changes to the dataset, so I thought I’d give it another crack – the end result meaning I might have something exciting for everyone to benefit from!
Since the dataset was published, the [...]

If you have an interest in open data, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve heard today’s announcement that the public will have more access to Ordnance Survey data. Details are a bit sketchy at the moment, but data set to be released includes boundary data, postcodes, and mid-scale mapping.
Consultation will start soon on exactly [...]

I’ve been playing around with the Ordnance Survey linked data and, while it’s not perfect, it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
It’s got me thinking though – in an ideal world, where an ‘information-wants-to-be-free’-esque hippy such as myself could get all the data I wanted, what cool stuff could be added on to [...]

As a lot of you probably know, I’m a big fan of open data, as well as driving innovation and making it easier to share information, it’s also a lot of fun.
Now, councils are pretty slow in picking this stuff up, for all sorts of reasons (lack of knowledge / interest, lack of technical skills, [...]

Well, it’s two days on from the closure of the Ernestmarples.com service, and I’m still hopping mad about it, but, as we know, you can’t do much with anger alone, so I’ve decided to do two key things to try and move this issue along.
Firstly, inspired by this tweet I decided to start a petition [...]

Well, it happened. today, the Royal Mail have issued ernestmarples.com with a takedown notice, demanding that the service be taken down immediately under pain of legal action.
For those of you who don’t know, Ernest Marples was / is a system that provided not-for-profit sites (such as HealthWhere, JobcentreProPlus.com, Planning Alerts and, by extension Twitterplan) with [...]

Some of you may have seen my blog post about the Ernest Marples API a few weeks ago, and since then there’s been no slapped wrists from the Post Office and a lot of people voicing their support
There’s also been a Perl helper library courtesy of Andy Armstrong and, as Perl looks a little bit [...]