A new website dedicated to making non-personal data held by the UK government available for software developers has launched today with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Data.gov.uk is being slammed with traffic but 6 months after the US government opened its Data.gov site the UK site already has more than 3 times as much data as the US site offers today. The Data.gov.uk has nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with at launch. The US site, Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets still today.
I’m keynote speaking at O’Reilly’s next Gov 2.0 conference in DC about health care in the cloud and the possibilities of opening up the data. It’s initiatives like this from the UK government that will help them move forward. Now we need this kind of initiative in healthcare to see how much of the $8,000 per year per person we’re spending on snakeoil.