The Guardian, by Jonathan Gray, Dec 13, 2011.
Last Friday I wrote a
short piece on for the Datablog giving some background and context for a big open data big policy package that was
announced yesterday morning by Vice President
Neelie Kroes.
But what does the package contain? And what might the new measures mean for the future of open data in Europe?
The announcement contained some very strong language in support of open data. Open data is the new gold, the fertile soil out of which a new generation of applications and services will grow. In a networked age, we all depend on data, and opening it up is the best way to realise its value, to maximise its potential.
Firstly, the European Commission will lead the way by pioneering open data policies and practises that it would like to see adopted by EU member states. "Eating your own dogfood", as software developers affectionately call it. They will open up documents and datasets from across dozens of institutions - no mean feat, as I'm sure UK Government representatives will have told Neelie when she and her team visited Number 10 earlier this year.
Secondly the Commission will put up €100 million in financial support for research into "data-handling technologies". This will no doubt stimulate cross-border collaboration around tools and technologies that will enable more people, projects, organisations and companies to derive value from data. Hopefully some of this will support some of the wonderful work that is already going on to clean up, harmonise, and expose data to the public - as well as funding the creation of more easy to use open source tools and applications that consume it to help us do more useful things and answer more sophisticated questions.
Both of these are laudable, and represent a huge commitment to open data from the European Commission.
Read more.