I remember The Register, early attempt at blogging, surprisingly still going - Charlie Hoult
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Father of the web builds UK government website
THE FOUNDER of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been helping the UK government build a website to give the great unwashed better access to official data.
According to the BBC, data.gov.uk will offer shedloads of public sector data, ranging from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use.
Sir Tim was hired to start a new wave of services that find ways to make use of the information sitting in government databases doing nothing.
Already developers have built a site that displays the location of schools according to the rating assigned to them by education watchdog Ofsted.
Sir Tim told the Beeb that government data is something taxpayers have already spent the money on, and when it is sitting there on a disk in somebody's office it is wasted.
A beta version of the website is live and more than 2,400 developers have registered to test the site and provide feedback.
So far 10 applications have been created using the data feeds, including Planningalerts, a free service that combs local authority planning websites looking for planning applications. It then automatically e-mails details of applications in the local area to anyone who has signed up for the service.
Another service, Fillthathole, allows people to report potholes to the right authority. It uses location data from the Office for National Statistics. µ
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As more and more sites start to take advantage of the technology powering data.gov.uk, it is vital that all of them can share their content with each other. By providing consistent, stable and described identifiers for the real-world things that the data is about, all of these disparate websites can link relevant material. Facts, figures and ideas can only be linked properly if everyone knows the right identifiers to use – basically we all need to be singing from the same hymn sheet when talking about something on the internet, be it a company, person, or even an abstract concept.
Yeah I insist that all my TVs are made by Marconi. As for my flush toilet system nothing can beat a Thomas Crapper.
No. Al is the 'Mother' of the web.
Damn! I thought that Al Gore was the father of the web!
Has nobody caught onto the porn-related punning potential of "fillthathole"? Let's just hope ISPs automatically whitelist "@fillthathole.gov.uk" emails or nobody will get them!
Does this mean I don't have to wait for MP's and Civil Servants to leave the data lying around?
Hopefully with TB-L in charge this site will render in all compliant browsers - not just IE6 (R.I.P)
Wow...
You can report potholes and get planning permission forms only to find out the report goes unnoticed and the forms you fill out online arent even processed because you are not a business and they see no point...
All of this can be got from the citizens advise which means someone is there and you can bug them till get gets done.
On the web no-one care if you scream :P
Yet another case of money being wasted, I wonder if they will make an app which lets you know how much everything costs to make and run, including the apps themselves... LOL...
lets face it, one of the PG Tips chimps could do better than the government.
they have an appalling record for data management so its probably a good thing that its outsourced