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Would you share your personal health and lifestyle information
if it helped researchers understand, for example, the causes
of the huge growth of diabetes in the UK?
Is it fair for the government to charge you to access
data that your taxes have already funded?
These were the questions posed last week in a public debate
called Free our Data? held in Manchester as part of the UK’s
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Festival of Social
Science.
Chaired by Jim Hancock, former Political Editor for BBC North
West, the debate featured Neil Ackroyd, Director of Data Collection
and Management from the Ordnance Survey (OS); Charles Arthur,
Technology Editor of The Guardian; Peter Elias, Strategic Advisor
to the ESRC; and Jill Matheson from the Office for National Statistics.
Forefront of the discussion was whether or not government data
should be made freely available. If the government made its data
about the UK and its citizens freely available, for instance,
would citizen’s social and economic lives improve or suffer?
Moreover, who should meet the costs of collecting and maintaining
the data? Those people who directly use the information, or the
wider public, who could ultimately benefit from the resulting
research?
It’s a hot topic, and the debate has been spurred in large
part by online campaign called Free Our Data, instigated by Guardian
Technology in 2006 after publishing an article titled, Give
us back our crown jewels (at http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1726229,00.html)
In this article, writers Charles Arthur and Michael Cross point
out the inherent hypocrisy of using taxes to fund the collection
of public data, and charging UK citizens and businesses to access
it. Arthur and Cross write: “This situation prevails across
a number of government agencies. Its effects are all bad. It
stifles innovation, enterprise and the creativity that should
be the lifeblood of new business…a detailed study shows
that the UK’s closed attitude to its data means we lose
out on commercial opportunities, and even hold back scientific
research in fields such as climate change.”
The Free Our Data campaign states that charging for the data
collected by government-owned bodies means that the government
is restricting growth for both public and private use of this
information – data which could benefit UK society and citizens.
Keep the task of collecting the data in the hands of tax-payer
funded agencies, campaign makers assert, and then persuade the
government to abandon copyright on national data.
The United States is one government that makes the data it collects
available free to all. It is also one country that has seen the
greatest amount of innovation in applications that merge government-generated
data with a service already provided by a private company. GoogleMaps
and Microsoft’s MapPoint “mash-ups” (a new
dataset from two sources) are two examples of these enterprises.
Timothy Berners-Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web, was
at Oxford as a guest lecturer last week, putting another voice
to the Free Data debate as he called for more open access to
Ordnance Survey mapping data to be used to help build the “semantic
web” - which he defines as a “web of data.” In
this realm, the business and research opportunities to merge
government data and statistics with mapping services, live traffic
feeds, weather analysis, medical data - to suggest a few obvious
examples - are huge.
This debate is the first of many, says Berners-Lee. “What
happens with OS is going to be replayed with anonymised medical
data, with data about kinds of public things.” (Source:
The Guardian)
“Technological advances mean massive computing power
can help social scientists accurately answer questions that have
previously been only guessed at,” says Peter Halfpenny,
Executive Director of the ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science.
Using the huge growth in diabetes occurring the UK at the moment
as an example, Halfpenny claims that, by combining data about “every
Briton’s health, diet, lifestyle, genes, and environmental
factors; researchers can pinpoint reasons for the new prevalence
of this disease.”
The issue at heart of the Free Data debate in the UK is that,
while researchers may have the computer power, they lack much
of the data. A large amount of information already collected
by the UK government it is not freely accessible to researchers,
therefore social scientists are held back from making breakthroughs
in their research. It is also, critics warn, a detriment to the
economy, as it prevents the ability for private companies to
create innovative services, creating a much bigger loss in terms
of entrepreneurship, job creation and the loss of a competitive
edge.
Learn more at: http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/index.php
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