UK Government doing the mashup thing
Clearly following on from the antipodes, the UK Government is now holding a mashup competition as well. But it appears that they haven’t quite gone as far as we have in New Zealand – at least not in terms of trying to remove as many restrictions on the use of Government data.
Having a look at the data page, where the Government has published data, it is interesting to note that citizens are required to enter click-use licensing agreements, and commit to using API’s to access government data. You can see some of the frustration on the page listing the data downloads.
Why are they such a problem? Well, the data can only be used for non-commercial purposes – that is going to hinder development somewhat, with no potential return at the end of the work. The licensing agreements appear to allow the government agency to pull the plug at any point if they don’t like what you are doing – I wonder what would happen if a mashup showed an inconvenient truth for a government, would that be reason to get a government agency to pull the data plug? Another joy of accessing data through API’s is that they are limiting queries on their servers to a few thousand queries per day (in the case of the Ornance Survey).
Which is why Government data really should be properly freed. It needs to be released to obtain a life of its own under a suitable Creative Commons license. Let citizens download the data, mash it up on their systems, and deal with all the issues. Governments must not become the gatekeepers of this information through API’s and license agreements.