UK Postcode data blocked by central government

N0. 10 has just announced a U-Turn in the freeing geospatial data in the UK. As announced by the guardian, the government has turn down the idea to release postcode data to community and non-profit web site.

In response to the No. 10 petition the government stated: Royal Mail invests significantly in collating and maintaining the Postcode Address File (PAF) and this cost is recovered through an independently regulated licensing arrangement.  It would of course be very time-consuming and costly for anyone to try to replicate the list, so Royal Mail licenses PAF data, for a fee, allowing others to use it.  Under Section 116 of the Postal Services Act 2000,   Royal Mail must maintain the PAF and make it available to any person who wishes to use it on “such terms as are reasonable”.

The government decision in blocking the release the post code data will disappoint and send mix message just a day after the release of the data.gov.uk web site with thousands of dataset available for free, even for commercial use.

London DataStore – UK mapping is getting freer

As announced in the Guardian news paper, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/06/london-datastore-launch-johnson-mashups, Boris Johnson has launched a new GIS data store for London with hundreds of datasets available for free and to be used in mash-up.

The site will be fully available at the end of January and the following address: http://data.london.gov.uk/. So far the following data category seems to be available:

Business and Economy

Crime and Community Safety

Demographics

Employment and Skills

Health

Housing

Planning

Transparency

The current list of datasets which will be made available is available here: http://data.london.gov.uk/datastore/data-packages-launch. It seems that more than 200 datasets will be made available.

Chanel 4 is also offering a fund of £200,000, through the 4IP Developer’s fund, in total to two companies or individuals with an outstanding idea for a product or application that uses information available on this site.