Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning - Educational Research

One of the better actions undertaken in the later days of the last UK Labour government was to embrace the open data movement. Following a campaign lead by Nigel Shadbolt and Tim Berners Lee and backed by the Guardian newspaper under the slogan (if I remember right) of  ’Free our Data’, the governement agreed ... A new website – data.gov.uk -  was set up as an access point for data and to allow developers to post links to tools and apps.  When Labour lost power to the new right wing Conservative- Liberal Democrat Coalition, many feared for the future of the initiative. Yet somewhat surprisingly the new Government embraced the Open Data movement, putting pressure on local governmental bodies to allow free access to their data ...  However more important may have been research suggesting that there could be a major new market for private enterprises producing apps based on open data.  However such a vision seems to have been misplaced. A cursory examination of the apps page on the data.gov.uk web site suggests a steady stream of new apps. However many of these are of a relatively limited appeal or have mainly a research use ... So what has gone wrong – if indeed anything has? Whilst it is very welcome that such data is being openly released and this is a boon for research, the truth is that only a very limited subset of data is going to be of general interest. And even within this subset, the differences in the way data is formatted and presented and the uncertainty of in what form future such data will be released, means that working with such open data is not simple – especially if developers wish to link different data sets. I doubt that a major market will emerge based on open public data. I believe that open data will fuel research and public service development. However apps providing access to services will continue to require public support, if only to clean and standardise data and provide a more advanced data service to app developers, rather than just access to raw data."