Public sector organisations will benefit from the UK government's initiative to publish official data on local services on the data.gov.uk website, according to the Local Government Association and Socitm.
Jos Creese, Socitm vice president, confirms that since the greater part of government data is collected and held a the local level, the open data agenda is hugely important to local authorities.
If information about schools, buildings, rights of way, facility opening times and other non-personal data that local councils hold is made freely available by councils on their websites in machine-readable form, the data can be readily re-used by web developers to create useful additional information and services for the public.
If data on the location of recycling facilities were to be made available by all councils it would be easy for a web developer to create a mashup enabling people to put in their postcode and identify the facility nearest to them, probably with filtering by type of items accepted and opening hours.
Using the principles of open data, councils could simply publish this data to their websites in a standard format to enable easy access, and at the same time saving time and resources.
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