Paul Miller

There has been some coverage of the recent announcement by UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, that Sir Tim Berners-Lee will be helping the UK Government to make more of its data available for use and reuse. Charles Arthur at the Guardian was quick off the mark, and the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones followed through with an interesting telephone conversation, the full content of which is now available.

“So that government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people, I [Gordon Brown] have asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee who led the creation of the world wide web, to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data in the web over the coming month.”

The ‘coming month’? Singular??? That’s definitely what the transcript says…

Readers of this blog will be no strangers to Berners-Lee, the Linked Data movement, or the opportunities to apply some of its ideas to mainstream applications in the public and private sectors.

It’s good to see the mainstream attention. Now all we have to do is make the most of opportunities like this (and similar initiatives emerging from the Obama administration) to deliver on the promise.

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