A workshop in Norwich tells businesses how they can benefit from the opening up of government data. Internet co-founder Sir Tim Berners Lee believes this will make a huge difference to the way the web works and heads up a new Institute of Web Science to open up the vast amount of data held by government, councils and other public bodies and realise the economic benefits.

Web technology now allows organisations to pull data easily from other sites using a language called SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) so specific items of data can be embedded in their web sites which change as the source data changes. This makes re-using data simpler and faster.
Internet co-founder Sir Tim Berners Lee believes this will make a huge difference to the way the web works and heads up a new Institute of Web Science to open up the vast amount of data held by government, councils and other public bodies and realise the economic benefits.

A new website www.data.gov.uk was launched this year with more than three thousand data sets with over 2 billion items of information down to local level and the programme is a cornerstone of the Government’s Digital Britain strategy along with improving broadband access and widening use of the internet to the Digitally Excluded.

The workshop – called Hacking the State – is being held at Epic Studios on Magdalen Street from 3.00 and guest speaker is Paul Davidson who is working in the team to open up local government data.

“Businesses use a vast amount of public sector data from statistical information about population and business produced by the Office of national Statistics to planning information on new developments,” said Paul. “Some of this is used for business planning and marketing by firms while there is also a growing group of web companies and social enterprises developing added value services based on public data.”
Some of the most public examples of social and community use have been developed by MySociety whose founder Tom Stienberg has advised both the government and the Conservative Party – playing a strong role in developing David Cameron’s idea of “an army of armchair auditors” holding the public sector to account by being able to see details of spending and performance. MySociety’s websites like FixMy Street and TheyWorkForYou are designed to do exactly that.

Norfolk County Council, who are organising the seminar, were successful in getting £100,000 funding from the department of Communities and Local Government for their Timely Information to Citizens pilot which is pioneering some of this work.

The core of their work is the NorfolkHomePage project which uses web technology to pull together online information relevant to a local area from across the public, private and community sectors. Two HomePages have been launched so far at http://yarmouth.norfolhomepage.gov.uk and http://diss.norfolkhomepage.org.uk and a decision on how to roll the service out will be taken after their success is evaluated.

The projects also form part of the Interreg funded European Smart Cities project www.smartcities.info .
“There is a large amount of information about your local area on the web but unless you know it is there it is hard to find it,” said project leader Tim Anderson. “News media like the EDP capture quite a lot of it but are restricted by space and traditional community websites can also be very time consuming to maintain. Modern web services have allowed us, with our technology partner Gallomanor, to use open source software to develop pages which pull in new information from a wide range of websites, blogs and social networking media like YouTube.

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