Liverpool Post/ACME creative debate on the power of data - Liverpool Daily Post

"Dr Simon Holgate is founder of Sea Level Research, which offers clients such as the Port of Liverpool access to real-time data on water levels and weather conditions. He said companies like his have started springing up in recent years as governments have realised the power of opening up data. He said: “When I first started in science, the drive for Government agencies certainly was to sell their data and to make any added value products themselves. “If you think about the Met Office, for example, that was a very big and very closed data set. Nobody else had access to data from weather stations, or forecasts, or anything else. “Yes, they did bring in revenue from selling forecasts and that sort of thing but here weren’t any added-value products that could piggy-back on that. If the Met Office hadn’t thought of it or didn’t have the resources, it didn’t happen. “We’ve now switched round. Even the Met Office has to open all its data and it allows people like me, Francis and many others to build new products on that data.” ..."