Pezholio

Regular readers of this blog will have seen that, over the past 12 months or so, I’ve been banging on about linked data and SPARQL quite a bit, posting up example queries and the like, but with not much explanation about why I’m doing what I’m doing. Thanks to the good folks at Talis and [...]

It’s been a while since my last post about local spending data, and, since then, our finance team have been busy beavering away behind the scenes to get our own spending data out of the council’s finance systems. However, from the outset, I was really pleased that both our finance people and our chief exec [...]

During the Lichfield Hacks and Hackers day yesterday (bigger blog post to come on that later) – I was gifted a list of grit bins in Lichfield District, I got very excited about this, but my excitement was quickly dampened when I realised that there was no geographical data in the list, just road names [...]

On Friday, I toddled along to London for a bit of a chat about local spending data, organised by LeGSB, the local government e-Standards body. In particular we looked at how councils can publish their spending data in a linked data format. It was an interesting day, and much of the work seems to have [...]

Today I was at a ‘quick and dirty’ local spending data workshop at Birmingham City Council’s newly refurbished offices on Lancaster Circus. There’ll be more detailed info to come on the Local Open Data Community (login required), but I just wanted to blog a few of my thoughts post the meeting. There was a lot [...]

It’s been a while since my last blog post, and after a request from Twitter, I thought it might be time to dust off WordPress and do a quick blog post. Since we last spoke, UK Postcodes (the postcodes webservice I blogged about a few blog posts back) has been plodding along nicely and, as [...]

Some people would say we’re mad, but last Saturday, on the hottest day of the year so far, a group of people eschewed barbecues and beer in the garden for a whole day spent working with mapping data and other bits of open data to help people understand the benefits of open data at Mapitude, [...]

Well, it’s finally happened, Ordnance Survey have gone from being the bad guy of the internet, a big, bumbling behemoth, squishing innovation wherever it goes, to being the darling of the internet, throwing out free data wherever it goes (well, sort of). As well as lots of mapping data being released, it also release Codepoint [...]

Finding out who your councillor is isn’t always easy is it? Even if you know which council provides your services, wards often have odd sounding names, and council websites don’t always have an easy postcode search. With this in mind, and now the Office of National Statistics have released a brand new API and because [...]

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 [...]