Tomorrow the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is set to announce the launch of a new ‘datastore’ website that will contain over 200 datasets, many of which include previously unreleased information, on the UK’s capital city.
Over £200,000 of funds have been donated to the project which hopes to inspire and help developers to use the data in new and unique ways. Channel 4 has already announced that they will be offering up to £200,000 for the most innovative uses of the data. The datastore itself is currently scheduled to go live on the 29th of January and is the first stage in the new data.gov.uk project.
The data.gov.uk project has been inspired by the similar data.gov project that has been running in the United States overseen by the presidents chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra. Boris Johnson will be joined by Aneesh via a live satalite to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where the project will be officially announced.
Johnson, who has been a long-time advocate of freely available data, seems excited at the potential of the project and released this statement: “The superb new London ‘Datastore’ will unleash valuable facts and figures that been languishing for far too long in the deepest recesses of City Hall. I firmly believe that access to information should not just be the preserve of institutions and a limited elite. Data belongs to the people particularly that held by the public sector and getting hold of it should not involve a complex routine of jumping through a series of ever decreasing hoops.”
Hopefully, should the project prove to be as successful here as it has been in the US, similar datastores will be launched for other major cities throughout the United Kingdom.
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