Below is my article in today’s Evening Standard on the London Datastore and impact of freeing London’s data: Help! What should I do? There I was, late for dinner with the Twitter delegation, and the docking station was full so I couldn’t park my Boris bike. I whipped out my iPhone, pressed the bike hire app, and a map indicated that...
This month in Charing Cross Hospital, West London (part of Imperial College NHS Trust) we launched a new service called myJoint. myJoint gives patients more information and greater control, improving their care experiences and allowing us as clinicians to keep track on how our patients are doing once they leave hospital. We hope that our new online service will help...
Just to let you know that from tomorrow comments will not be published immediately on the datastore. This is due to a huge increase in the number of spam comments we have received which were starting to clutter up pages and make the site more difficult to use. Please be assured that all comments that are non-spam will be published.
When it comes to freeing the data, we don’t just talk about it – we deliver. We are delighted that Transport for London is today launching its new website area for developers with free live Tube information, showing the location of trains across the London Underground network at any time. It is part of TfL’s digital strategy and of the...
There has been a good amount of coverage on the recent announcement by the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London on their desire to catalyze investment in east London to transform it into one of the world’s great technology centres. We know that areas like Shoreditch have been incredibly successful, largely without any state investment, thriving predominantly on the creativity...
We are aware from all the comments on the Datastore blog that there is a lot of frustration in the developer community regarding the restoration of the TfL Trackernet feed. We hope that the recent release by TfL of bus and tube timetables and schedules along with the release of their live message boards and live traffic disruptions gives you...
The Home Office is consulting on changes to the oversight of police forces in the UK, abolishing police authorities and replacing them with elected individuals. In London, it’s expected that this would mean the Mayor would become the Police and Crime Commissioner and the London Assembly would be responsible for holding the elected Commissioner to account. The consultation paper includes a...
It’s been six months since the launch of the Datastore, and during this time we have sourced and released over 260 datasets. The current top five popular datasets are: • TfL Live Traffic Cameras • Borough Council Election Results 2010 • Begging Incidents Recorded by British Transport Police • Average House Price • Oyster Ticket Stop Locations In return, you’ve created some...
The new coalition government’s commitment to transparency heralds an exciting time for the possibilities of open data. The data release movement is relatively new and it’s difficult to predict its full economic impact in advance. The US leads the way in encouraging and financially incentivising the software community to develop new apps based on publicly available data. The first round of...
“We will unleash a tsunami of data”. So said our Downing Street contact in the weeks after the election. And so it’s proven to be, from the numbers of civil servants and what they get paid (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jun/18/civil-service-statistics-headcount) to the salaries of Westminster advisors (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jun/13/government-special-advisers-list). Those would have been enough to keep us happy, but then we got COINS – the Treasury’s...
