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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]