Peter Hoskin

Shining a light into government

I wouldn’t normally start the day by linking to a public sector website – but this one is actually worth your time.  It’s the launch version of data.gov.uk, created with the help of Tim Berners-Lee among others, which aims to present statistics about government performance in a straightforward, easy-to-access way.  You’ll get a sense of what’s there by rummaging around this page: there’s stuff on benefits, deaths, immigration, traffic, and so on.

Ok, so it’s not perfect.  You’d hardly call the current crop of data exhaustive, and you could complain that much of it was available previously if you knew where to look for it.  But this is the earliest public incarnation of this site, and we’re promised that it is “very much a work in progress” – so things will probably improve.

But, even as it stands, data.gov.uk

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