Despite some speed humps, many cities and governments are going full speed ahead with opening their data. One of the biggest is the City of Vancouver’s Open Data Catalogue (note the copy and paste spelling of catalog, those wacky Canadians). Well they’ve launched a new update that simplifies the process of navigating the data. Every time I stop by I see more and more data available in more formats. I think the city should be commended for their embracing open data sharing with citizens.
The other open data update is the data.gov.uk website. The search is less than useful as you can’t perform advanced searches. Sean Gorman did a quick look and didn’t find any specific geo datasets, but I’m sure we’ll start seeing them. One thing that didn’t surprise me was the presence of SPARQL. Why data.gov.uk would put such an annoying query language front and center is beyond me. But with Sir Tim Berners-Lee as and advisor I can only imagine that he pushed hard for its placement. (note I’m not a big fan of RDF so take that as you will). Still it is good to see the UK start working hard at sharing public data with everyone.
I wasn’t in Britain for the announcement of data.gov.uk, but I can only imagine it went something like this….
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0tgW_vJ05U&w=560&h=315]