I highlight again a single point from para 87 of the Power of Information review from my acronymically-entitled previous post PSI4U:

It is relatively easy to suggest changes that would give citizens and organisations better access to information held by government. These include … republishing information in open standards or as web services.

Let’s look at some examples central to the legal profession:

• The publication of the Statute Law Database as a free access, public resource was a huge step forward and did represent a “sea change” in the government’s attitude, but free access to its web views does not open up the data. You cannot easily extract, re-use or repurpose the data as you are at the mercy of its formatting and a URI scheme that relies on its internal document IDs; and there are no RSS feeds of new legislation.
• Similarly, the numerous different courts publish their judgments, but all in their own way and with no RSS feeds that I could see at last review. (BAILII does a grand job aggregating and making sense of these, but even they do not provide RSS feeds.)
• All government websites add important new policy documents daily to their websites, yet, again, there is no consistency and the provision of RSS feeds for these latest additions is relatively scant, patchy and inconsistent.

These are all materials which there is no argument we should be able to use and re-use freely, but for the sake of a few days’ programming time, we are denied the keys to open access which would unlock the data’s potential.

Then we have the PSI that is locked up in trading funds. This is a political issue, with the nay-sayers believing that its value can only be exploited via the fundholders’ monopolies and the open access brigade believing that huge social and commercial benefits will flow from its release into the public domain. We do have, in many cases, free access to the data in that we can, via the appropriate website, query the fundholders’ data for the information we need, but it is served up in small chunks, and if we want to do anything with a meaningful set of data, we are reduced to scraping the websites. That’s fair or foul depending your conscience rather than the niceties of copyright law.

If you’ve any interest in leveraging public sector information, then do publicise (via a link in your blogroll or wherever) and contribute to [updated 10/07/2008 OPSI’s Public Sector Information Unlocking Service].