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How businesses, and the government, can make money from non-personal, public sector data is a matter of ongoing debate

In 2009, the UK government asked Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the ‘World Wide Web’, and Nigel Shadbolt, a renowned computer scientist, to help make non-personal public sector data openly available through a single point of access. That project led to data.gov.uk, the online portal for open government data in the UK.

Political commitment to open data survived the transition to the current coalition government. “The phrase ‘open data’ and its use in transparency were everywhere in the Conservative manifesto and so, when they came to power, the commitments they were giving about releasing more data were clearly going to continue,” explains Shadbolt.

That is because the cause of open data traverses the political spectrum, he says. “If you believe in the use of non-personal government data for the public good, then it becomes a little bit like clean air – why wouldn’t you have it?”

This is not to say that everyone is in agreement about how open data should be produced, managed and used. One bone of contention relates to the notion, present in the Labour Party’s policy but accentuated by the coalition government, that open data should provide private businesses with commercial opportunities.

On the eve of the 2010 election, now-Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude promised that open government data would “boost British jobs”. He cited research by Dr Rufus Pollock of Cambridge University which claimed that open data would create an estimated £6 billion in additional value for the UK.

There are many ways in which open government data can aid businesses. For example, government spending data reveals how much public sector bodies are paying for goods and services, allowing alternative suppliers to pitch for business.

Another approach is for businesses to charge for commercial services that are based on open government data. This is a more contentious issue, however, as Spikes Cavell, a financial analytics service provider to local government organisations, found last year after it set up a website that published its clients’ spending data online.

Spikes Cavell said that SpotlightOnSpend, which was a free add-on service for its paying customers, helped local government organisations meet their transparency obligations, but some open data campaigners disagreed. In particular, they objected to the format in which the data was published, which was non-machine-readable and in summary form.

At the time, open data expert and blogger Chris Taggart wrote that “this is not open data, not a desirable approach, will not achieve the results of transparency or of equality of access, and is not good for the public sector”.

The storm blew over after Spikes Cavell agreed to publish the data in machine-readable format. But the episode showed that the commercial exploitation of open government, despite cross-party support, is still a matter of ideological debate.

Shadbolt is equivocal. “One notion is that the taxpayer has paid for collecting the data once already, and if a company makes a product that makes revenues, who’s going to benefit?” he says. “But there’s another argument that says the exchequer is going to benefit – it’s going to take tax revenue from it, and that’s better than it sitting there unused.”

He supports the likes of SpotlightOnSpend benefiting commercially from open government data. “They are taking data that is being published every month by local authorities, putting their own additional information and analytics onto that, and selling it back as a set of services around intelligent procurement or business intelligence. Why shouldn’t they do that?”

However, there are many unanswered questions, he admits. “There is a sense that public data is a new natural resource, and we don’t necessarily know at this point how the value will be generated. But we’ve got a good idea that some of it has high demand and there are people who want to do innovative things with it.”

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