Office of Public Sector Information

Posted by: William Heath

Public Sector Information Holder: Office of Public Sector Information

Information Asset: Efficiency & Fairness white paper and future white papers

The problem

This is a minor irritation not a big issue. But the (c) Crown copyright notice on recent Cabinet Office Excellence and fairness white paper reads:

"The text in this document may be reproduced free of charge in any format or media without requiring specific permission. This is subject to the material not being used in a derogatory manner or in a misleading context."

This sounds like a tax on dissent. It casts government in a bad light because it's hard to see how it would be enforced or damages assessed.

My ideal solution

Wouldn't
It
Be
Better
If
(Wibbi)
there were simply a crown copyright or creative commons notice, and people were allowed to quote this publicly paid-for material for any purpose - critical, satirical, polemic or just plain old discussing policy which is surely what a white paper is intended for.

What I would do

Exactly the same as I do now, except I wouldnt gripe about it.

Also we would all lose that nagging feeling that
a) we might face sanctions for quoting extracts and being critical and
b) government is still being paranoid and unreasonable.

Posted by: Harry Metcalfe

Public Sector Information Holder: Office of Public Sector Information

Information Asset: London Gazette Supplements

The problem

Notices & Supplements are not available in any machine readable format. They contain a wide range of extremely useful information about the activities of government and business.

My ideal solution

I would suggest two improvements that should run alongside each other:

• A REST API to query the existing database of notices and supplements. Data should be returned in XML or some equivalently useful format, and the API should be able to perform text searches, limit results by date or the type of notice/supplement, etc.
• An Atom feed for new notices. The system should provide a "see everything" feed as well as allowing users to specify what they'd like to see more narrowly, along the same lines as the database search API. This is essentially the same as the API, but provides 'live' access to the latest information in the gazette, rather than a search for its back catalogue.

What I would do

This is a rich dataset that provides many opportunities for innovation. One could use the information to monitor for the registration of company names of interest and to be notified of corporate insolvencies. Notifications of upcoming major roadworks could be overlaid onto a map, as could applications to discharge fluids into national waterways.Various notifications of applications for planning are published in the Gazette, which could be of great interest to those affected by them, and could be worked into services such as PlanningAlerts.com.

There is such a wide variety of data in this dataset that the possibilities are limited only by imagination.