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back to article 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 …

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  1. Red Bren
    Grenade

    iJustice

    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.

    4 0
  2. Scho
    FAIL

    Awful!

    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!

    0 0
  3. Terry Dooher

    Seems to be working now.

    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

    ---------------

    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?

    0 0
    1. Lost in a maze of twisty messages, all alike.
      Reply Icon

      Re: Guru Meditation

      Guru Meditation is also the Virtualbox name for a hang.

      0 0
    2. Alien Doctor
      Reply Icon

      Varnish http accelerator

      http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/

      0 0
  4. Matt Hawkins
    FAIL

    Government IT - Half baked and out of date

    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 Half of it doesn't work and most of the data is out of date.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.

    2 0
  5. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Happy

    Trouble is

    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

    0 0
  6. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Not working at all now ...

    Ah well, I suspect that they thought that noone would be interested and didn't cater enough capacity wise ...

    0 0
  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Why all the negativity?

    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.

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  8. xyz Silver badge
    Headmaster

    Grammar Timothy!

    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?

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