UK gov cuts ribbon on public datasets site
The Cabinet Office has officially taken the wraps off its data.gov.uk web portal, which is intended to serve as a central repository for British citizens to gain access to some government data. In true government style the site almost immediately was swamped by people eager to mash up the people's data. It launched with more …
I'm going to write an app that lets you look up the registration of the car that cut you up and shows you a map of where the arsehole lives, along with contact details for the 5 nearest ASBO'd hoodies to their house.
I was trying to browse the site earlier to have a look at what kind of datasets they may have that could be useful for my work, as well as maybe myself, but the search and view all just seems to fall over on each page or return nothing even on their suggested searches!
Pathetic until they fix the website!
Earlier today, tried the 'Browse all data' and received:
"Your search returned no results"
Tried the Blog to see if there was a fault noted and got:
---------------
Error 503 Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation
XID: 1553401285
Varnish
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Not sure what the Varnish is about, but I haven't seen a Guru Mediation since I waved goodbye to my Amiga 500 at a car boot sale. Who's the hippy working on the server?
Guru Meditation is also the Virtualbox name for a hang.
http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/
Typical Government IT effort. Half of it doesn't work and most of the data is out of date.
"Weekly Petrol Prices" were added in Nov 09 and are apparently updated ... err ... weekly. Not surprisingly they haven't been updated since Nov 09 ... the day they were uploaded.
We've got 2500 data sources they scream. Great. How about you start with 2 and when you can keep them updated add a few more.
said car was probably stolen *by* one of ASBO'd hoodies.
But I do like the joined up thinking. *
*Although naturally I would not wish to be condoning or encouraging criminal behaviour
Ah well, I suspect that they thought that noone would be interested and didn't cater enough capacity wise ...
Come on people cut them a bit of slack. It's a good initiative making the raw data available. They some way to go yet - like providing the data in something other than Excel format - but it's a start.
As to accessing the site: I tried it earlier today, and about half an hour ago. It was fast and had no problems with searches.
They've even "mashed up" their intro text....
Advised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt and others, government are opening up data for reuse.
I'm presuming they mean something like...
Advised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and others, government is opening up data for reuse.
Still a horrid sentence though...Why didn't Word pick it up?
