open data and apps
DESCRIPTION
Presentation given at Mobile Apps World 2010 by Tiffany St James on MobilTRANSCRIPT
Mobile Apps World 2010
Open Data & App Development
Tiffany St JamesWednesday 20 October, 2010
What do we mean by open data
• Open data is a philosophy and practice
requiring that certain data be freely
available to everyone, without restrictions
from copyright, patents or other
mechanisms of control.
And our govt means open data by...
• Non-personal data
• Information not code
• Figures, statistics
• Excel, tables, csv files
• Every report published
Why is this important?
• Transparency
• Public sector reform
• Social benefits
• Economic benefits
• Global leadership positioning
What did the UK Govt do?
• Opened up a repository for data
• Made departments publish data
• Created an online community of developers
• Made ‘linked data’ a reality
Why is this world class?
• A way of marking up data for the web
• Enables concepts to be linked together
• Letting people walk through the data by
concept - e.g. data that is about:
• Schools
• With a budget over £3m
• In South East of England
From this…
…To this
It looks like this:
How did they do it?
• Work with people who were best in class
• Establish processes for release
• Build a back end
• Soft launch
• Blogger briefings
• Created visualisations to show people
Example apps with public data
• Road traffic accidents
• Locrating – schools by Ofsted rating
• Where did my tax go?
• Compare the Care Home
• Day Nurseries
• UK Climate projections
Crowdspeak – Parly candidates
ASBOrometer
Scores on the Doors – food hygiene
Facebook crime stats quiz
UK Post Box
Find GPs
Or dentists
Or pharmacies
Other data stores - Guardian
Other data stores – US data.gov
From visualisations
To interactive apps
Grounding information for you..
What can we all learn from this?
• Information is beautiful…
• Making difficult things easy to understand is
worthwhile, useful and profitable
• Consider how you can bring alive
information for your clients?
What needs to happen next
• Getting data out of the geek ghettos to
enable people to
• interrogate it
• play with it
• interact with it
So what can I do?
• Businesses: Free your data
• Developers: Create apps
• Customers: Buy and demand apps
• All: Lobby to free data
Presentation at:www.stimulationltd.co.uk
www.slideshare.net/stimulation
Tiffany St James
www.twitter.com/tiffanystjames