by Derek Morrison, 10 April 2009
Here’e something for all UK publicly funded bodies to reflect on. Even though it’s the tax payer who funds the collection, aggregation and presentation of so much data/content why is it that so often said data/content ends up being treated as the exclusive property of those institutions or bodies (or fiefdoms within) receiving said public funds?
… by making the site accessible to machines too, the data they contain becomes more valuable – and so does the originating site, whose value resides in the data’s availability, not the number of people who arrive at its URL.
Quoting Adrian Short’s campaign for public bodies to design “inside-out” web sites in which sites should automatically syndicate data via, e.g. RSS feeds that can be fed to other sites or mobile systems and “mashed” to create other useful products for citizens (Guardian 9 April 2009).
