Join the debate at London’s Clinical Senate

NHS London has started to make NHS data publically available as part of the government’s Information Revolution.  There is a range of views about how data should be published and what is the most important kind of information for clinicians and for patients. The data is available on Datastore and on NHS London’s website here:…

East London Tech City – What do you think?

There has been a good amount of coverage on the recent announcement by the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London on their desire to catalyze investment in east London to transform it into one of the world’s great technology centres.   We know that areas like Shoreditch have been incredibly successful, largely without any…

Guess What’s Back? Trackernet Returns

When it comes to freeing the data, we don’t just talk about it – we deliver. We are delighted that Transport for London is today launching its new website area for developers with free live Tube information, showing the location of trains across the London Underground network at any time. It is part of TfL’s…

First Release of Health Data: Driving Choice & Improving Health Outcomes in London

The information revolution is a defining principle of the vision for the new NHS as outlined in the coalition government’s White Paper ‘Equity & Excellence – Liberating the NHS’. In our push to make Health data transparent and available to the public we have published the first of a number of pieces of Health data…

Update on comments

Just to let you know that from tomorrow comments will not be published immediately on the datastore. This is due to a huge increase in the number of spam comments we have received which were starting to clutter up pages and make the site more difficult to use. Please be assured that all comments that…

Changing the City through Pictures alone?

Yesterday City Hall hosted a Visualising London event. I introduced the day with a challenge that the growing digital visualisation movement has to go way beyond simply delivering beautiful evidence if it is to make a real difference. Of course visual impact will engage, but the intersection of the high art of information design, statistics…

First release of opinion data – telling Londoners what they already know.

In our push to make the work we do at the GLA transparent and available to the public we have published the first of a number of pieces of our opinion research data on Datastore. The first examples up and running are the 2009 Young Londoners Survey, and 2010 Annual London Survey datasets. These pieces…

Consultation on changes to the oversight of police forces

The Home Office is consulting on changes to the oversight of police forces in the UK, abolishing police authorities and replacing them with elected individuals.  In London, it’s expected that this would mean the Mayor would become the Police and Crime Commissioner and the London Assembly would be responsible for holding the elected Commissioner to…

Update on Trackernet Feed

We are aware from all the comments on the Datastore blog that there is a lot of frustration in the developer community regarding the restoration of the TfL Trackernet feed. We hope that the recent release by TfL of bus and tube timetables and schedules along with the release of their live message boards and…

McCandless shows the power of intelligent visualisation

David McCandless – driving force behind the Information is Beautiful site, gives an inspiring and thought provoking presentation on how intelligent, well designed data visualisations can help us understand the ever increasing information deluge. Moving quickly through discussions of current affairs topics such as American defence spending versus African debt, to more frivolous endeavours (looking at…

From journalists to interpreters – is data changing the way we work?

“We will unleash a tsunami of data”. So said our Downing Street contact in the weeks after the election. And so it’s proven to be, from the numbers of civil servants and what they get paid (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jun/18/civil-service-statistics-headcount) to the salaries of Westminster advisors (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jun/13/government-special-advisers-list). Those would have been enough to keep us happy, but then…

Economic benefits of data release

The new coalition government’s commitment to transparency heralds an exciting time for the possibilities of open data.  The data release movement is relatively new and it’s difficult to predict its full economic impact in advance. The US leads the way in encouraging and financially incentivising the software community to develop new apps based on publicly available…

The Story so far………

It’s been six months since the launch of the Datastore, and during this time we have sourced and released over 260 datasets. The current top five popular datasets are:   • TfL Live Traffic Cameras• Borough Council Election Results 2010• Begging Incidents Recorded by British Transport Police• Average House Price• Oyster Ticket Stop Locations   In return, you’ve created some…

Tube Feed Update

Owing to overwhelming demand by apps that use the service, the London Underground feed has had to be temporarily suspended. We hope to restore the service as soon as possible but this may take some days. We will keep everyone informed of progress towards a resolution.

Boost for London’s Software Developer Community and SMEs as TfL lifts all restrictions on commercial reuse of its data

Today’s announcement by TfL that they have lifted all restrictions on the commercial reuse of their data will come as good news to the developer community. There is no doubt that this will provide a welcome economic boost to London’s SMEs and individual developers.   And according to Chris MacLeod, Director of Group Marketing at…

Visualisation for Everyone

“Every day, every hour, maybe even every minute, we’re looking [at] and absorbing information via the web. We’re steeped in it. Maybe even lost in it. So perhaps what we need are well-designed, colourful and – hopefully useful charts to help us navigate” – David McCandless Author of Information is Beautiful, 2009. London’s datastore is…

The Possibilities of Real Time Data

We are looking forward to hosting our seminar The Possibilities of Real Time Data on Monday 19 April and still have some tickets left if anyone wants to attend. Its free so just email mailto:lisa.price@london.gov.uk if you want to come along. Paul Clarke will be moderating the Twitter Feed on the morning and anyone interested…

Accessible London – TfL Releases its data on London Underground Station Accessibility

The 2012 Games provide a useful opportunity to get people thinking about how accessible/inaccessible London is going to be in time for the games. So the release of TfL Data around the accessibility of stations is extremely timely. Collected by London Underground and represented in 17 different spreadsheets (currently being worked on for upload by…

Redbridge Raise the Bar

When people in the public sector talk about open data there can be quite a variance in definition. So it was an eye opening experience to meet with Redbridge Council last week to discuss their approach to data and their proposed participation in London’s Datastore. Chief Executive Roger Hampson is a member of the Local Government…

Data, Data, Everywhere. Now let’s make a difference with it.

“Everywhere you look, the quantity of information in the world is soaring… Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is difficult enough.  Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information is harder still.  Even so, the data deluge is already starting to transform business, government, science and…

Hectic times

It’s been a fairly hectic time since our soft launch of the London Datastore on 7th January which featured a live linkup (well mostly live!) with the CES technology conference in Vegas. We were delighted that the launch received such a positive response in both the developer community Mad Prof, Brian Hoadley, Chris Thorpe, Chris…