data.gov.uk has dramatically revised its layout (for the better!) and recently released 557 datasets (1.8 million entries) representing all UK government spending over 25,000 pounds under the section Open Spending.
This represents a new milestone in open data releases around the world and provide a new range of insights into the financial decisions of the UK government.
It's actually a piece of open source software called OpenSpending that was developed by the community - the original dataset was called COINS and is very hard to work with let alone understand. What you see there is the most primitive interface to OpenSpending, the project team is working on more advanced ones at http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/dashboard/#view=uk-bubble-charts
ReplyDeleteYou might get the Italian Regional Governments budgets instead for example - OpenSpending spins off WDMMG to include many different countries/jurisdictions.
This goes hand-in-hand with another project called OpenCorporates that stores company registrations from around the world and includes functionality to reconcile the names of those entities. I have to say the UK Gov2 folks are racing ahead in open data and engaging with the open data community - OpenCorporates is now going to be used to reconcile data within government http://opencorporates.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/case-study-fixing-broken-government-information-with-open-data/ and the Alpha.gov.uk site is based on ScraperWiki technology (another community project) to mashup the different data sources.
I have been trying to get OpenSpending/OpenCorporates working for Australia but keep getting stonewalled by the licences. Ironically, Business.gov.au did a site upgrade just today but neglected to change to an open CC-BY licence as I thought all new web pages were going to have based on the latest version of the AGIMO web guide.
Hi
ReplyDeleteTks very much for post:
I like it and hope that you continue posting.
Let me show other source that may be good for community.
Source: Police cover letter
Best rgs
David