Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has been handed a job in the United Kingdom to make public data truly public: by putting it in the Internet. This move is similar to the US government’s decision last December 8 to make “high value, machine readable datasets” generated by the federal government available to the general public. Data catalogs, geographical data and the tools to read it are downloadable in their respective sites with free access for private or commercial reuse.

This opening up for reuse would let people have access to the wealth of government-generated data—ranging from scientific, economic, social, financial and others—and turn them into new useful information. With the advent of Web 2.0 and collaborative tools, geolocation and data visualization can make statistics literally leap out of the screen.

Berners Lee said that “one of the main motivations is that governments should be held accountable, that people should be able to see where things can be made better—people, business and government can work together to make a difference.”

Just like his idea for the Internet being free, Tim Berners Lee said the same for data. He pointed out that “making public data available for reuse is about increasing accountability and transparency and letting people create new, innovative ways of using it. Government data should be a public resource. By releasing it, we can unlock new ideas for delivering public services, help communities and society work better, and let talented entrepreneurs and engineers create new businesses and services.”

In a “manifesto” published in a major UK daily, the Web pioneer said that data “underpins our economy and our society—data about how much is being spent and where, data about how schools, hospitals and police are performing, data about where things are and data about the weather.” Furthermore he said that “until recently not many non-technical people concerned themselves with data and how it could be used better.”

Issues related to security and privacy are avoided by carefully removing personal information in the publicly available datasets.

With more than 2,500 sets available for reuse, data.gov.uk offers a lot of information, raw data or otherwise. MP Stephen Timms, minister for Digital Britain in the UK, said “Whether a company exists or is solvent, we have data on that topic. If you need to know whether the house that you are about to buy is prone to flooding, we have data on that. I am told that we have how many fish there are in the English Channel.”

We could use that kind of information in our country but it is very difficult to obtain information here from official sources. What is available is usually not put in a machine-readable (read: digital) format. There are times that one is made to wade through reams of photocopied paper when obviously it was printed out of a word processing program that resides in a PC somewhere. Aside from avoiding using a lot of paper, downloading a public file from a central server is a lot easier than photocopying it.

The basic argument is that these data—most especially those that were obtained using public money—should be a public resource. There should be no need to spend anything more to obtain a copy of that data.

One of the requirements of such a policy of making government data publicly available would be that government should make documents and spreadsheets in a format that is also open. The format should not be encumbered by proprietary claims and should also work using open tools such as free and open source software (or FOSS).

This policy has been part of the long-term advocacy of Rep. Satur Ocampo and Teddy Casino of Bayan Muna who sponsored the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) Act (HB 5769 a.k.a. FOSS bill) in Congress. Satur is planning to file a similar bill in the Senate should he get in this coming elections. Satur and Liza Maza are both running for the Senate under the Makabayan Coalition and have been adopted by the NP as guest candidates.

In science, there is a burgeoning movement called Open Data that aims to put raw scientific information available to all as it comes. It is quite the extreme opposite of the secretive industrial laboratories and in fact invites others to peek at the data as it is generated. It is high time that our government and other social institutions follow suit. We have a lot at stake here. Opening government data will partly assure transparency and accountability—qualities that we see so little of from our institutions.