The United Kingdom has it's own version of data.gov and it has the added cachet of being promoted and advised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

• data.gov.uk

  This site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data. [T]his means it needs to be: easy to find; easy to licence; and easy to re-use. We are drawing on the expertise and wisdom of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt to publish government data as RDF – enabling data to be linked together.

• Tim Berners-Lee unveils government data project, BBC (21 January 2010).

  Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee has unveiled his latest venture for the UK government, which offers the public better access to official data.

  A new website, data.gov.uk, will offer reams of public sector data, ranging from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use.

Looks like the UK version of data.gov, developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is going to be released soon. It is "language-based" where "linkages are based on human language, rather than hard-coded hyperlinks", a.k.a. the Semantic Web concept that Berners-Lee has been touting for years.

I like the way Nancy Scola of Personal Democracy Forum describes the Semantic Web:

[Berners-Lee] vision is of a web that understands the connections between disparate bits of information in a way similar to how the human mind might effortlessly connect an address on London's Whitehall with the events of World War II that Winston Churchill directed from an underground bunker there. Data woven through with more human ways of interpretation might, just might, make the gap between making government information public and making it useful a little smaller.

The BBC reports that "Data.gov.uk is built with semantic web technology, which will enable the data it offers to be drawn together into links and threads as the user searches...we will also be able to look for patterns...visitors to data.gov.uk will want to make their own mash-ups from the information available."

Yes, and we should be making mashups from our country's data.gov for our library patrons too! Let's get to it! I'll be working on mine and will show you how it can be done.

Today, some mixed good news/bad news about the availability of free public data in the UK. As we've noted here before (e.g., Privatized Data Woes in Britain and News from abroad: UK open statutes & RFID in Canadian coins and The Semantic Web + Government Information = Serendipitous Reuse) the British government sells limited-use licences to its GIS data on a cost recovery basis. Now, as part of a proposed national geoportal, the UK would "create a single point of entry on the web to data held by public bodies such as local councils, Ordnance Survey (OS), the British Geological Survey and the Environment Agency." But, as the story says, "A new system will make geospatial information available without charge - yet we'll still have to pay."

• An Inspired debate on access, by Michael Cross, The Guardian, May 22 2008.

First, some very good news. Civil servants revealed last week that the British government has begun work on a system to make all the geospatial data it holds on the natural environment available for free inspection and re-use. Now the bad news. In this context, "free" means we will still have to pay to download much key data, especially if it is to be published or otherwise used commercially.

I know we usually focus on US documents, but it's good to look at what's happening in other countries once in a while.

BoingBoing, one of my favorite blogs, frequently posts information of interest to libraries, and today was a banner day.

The first post of interest was a story about the UK's new *free* statutes database. The UK Department for Constitutional Affairs, after 13 years in the works, has launched the Statute Law Database project. Before this, access to consolidated versions of the law of the UK wasn’t possible without paying lots of money to a private publisher. While the writer mentioned that the situation in the US was similar with access dominated by Westlaw and LexisNexis, a kind commenter pointed out that West and Lexis indeed dominate case law access, but US code could be freely accessible via GPOAccess, Thomas and Cornell's Legal Information Institute.

A little closer to home, The US counter-intelligence office of the U.S. Department of Defense recently related that Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada. Evidently, this is one way that foreign agents use to illicitly acquire military technology.