The British equivalent to Obama’s data.gov opened today. Over at ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick points out the scale of the ambition involved:

At launch, Data.gov.uk has nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. The U.S. site, Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets today.

[…][Unlike the US equivalent, the site] includes 22 military data sets at launch, including one called Suicide and Open Verdict Deaths in the U.K. Regular Armed Forces.

However, these are raw datasets. As Paul Clarke points out, the site only pays lip service to openness until someone comes along and turns these sets into useful reports and applications:

The only test of real success is: use. Not usefulness. Not theoretical use. Real use. Getting beyond the novelty application, the demonstrator, and the hobby lies at the heart of really untapping the potential of data.gov.uk.

Indeed, the figures that Techcrunch Europe report suggest that turning this data into something useful may be harder than it sounds:

So far over 2,400 developers have registered to test the site and provide feedback, [while] 10 applications have been created.

I left a comment on Paul Clarke’s post pointing out some potential pitfalls that may inhibit innovation, including the government’s insistence on licensing the data under Crown Copyright and their impartiality regarding Twitter. There’s also been some criticism around the lack of a common data format for each feed (although the RDF triple proudly displayed on the front page suggests this is likely to change).

Nonetheless, I believe this represents a huge step forward. Turning raw materials into useful, compelling applications that improve the users’ quality of life requires a huge amount of creativity and talent, and providing the data feeds in the first place is a crucial first step.

You can list all the available datasets here.

Since we started Elgg, I’ve always kept a very open philosophy about how the software should work. From the human perspective, we wanted it to be as inclusive as possible, with an easy-to-use interface and innards that allowed you to do very technical things (like, in Elgg 0.x, republishing aggregated RSS) with very little knowhow. From the organizational perspective, we didn’t want there to be a barrier to entry; we released it under the GNU Public License and allowed anyone to download and install it for free. And technically, we allowed anyone to augment, extend and replace its functionality, maintained an open architecture and embraced technologies like FOAF, RSS and so on.

That was five years ago. The world is only now beginning to catch up.

The Silicon Valley Web community is buzzing with “open” ideas: data portability, the open stack, the open mesh, OpenID, OAuth, and so on. There have been two Data Sharing Summits, a bunch of Identity Workshops, and efforts are crystallizing around open activity streams, contacts sharing, and virtually anything else you might want to transfer between web applications. David Recordon, co-creator of OpenID and all-round cheerleader for openness, has predicted that Facebook won’t be a walled garden by 2010.

This is fantastic stuff, which I intend to get even more involved with as the year progresses. Good work is happening all round, and even sleepy behemoths like Microsoft are beginning to take notice.

What worries me slightly is that the work is centered around the Silicon Valley community, and within that is largely built with public-facing commercial websites in mind. Those sites (like Digg, MySpace, the SixApart properties and so on) are awesome without a doubt, but the potential of social technologies falls well beyond the commercial web. People are beginning to use them on intranets, within universities, across governmental departments and so on – places that could use the same approaches, but need to be represented in the discussions.

Their exclusion is not the fault of the people producing the standards and doing this great work; they’re very happily welcoming anyone with a productive contribution to the table. Instead, it falls to those organizations to realize what they’re missing out on and begin to pay more attention to cutting edge technology. The Obama administration is certainly waking up to this, but others – notably the UK government – are extremely reticent to embrace anything open at all.

The technology is falling into place to allow for an open, transparent, knowledge-orientated economy. Now it’s time to look at what else is needed.