A warning on data.gov

The government's data initiative data.gov.uk was launched to a great deal of fanfare yesterday.

But out of it comes a warning from one of its creators Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

According to Berners-Lee

social inequalities between different areas will quickly become apparent. adding that

There was a risk that some areas would seem like “ghettoes” compared to others, although this was not necessarily a bad thing as it would create pressure on politicians to spend money on improving the worse-off areas.

Source-Telegraph.co.uk

Data.gov set to launch

Rumours abounding that tomorrow will see the launch of data.gov.uk,under the auspices of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt.

Charles Arthur writes at Media Guardian that

The aim is to encourage British web developers and companies to create websites and information feeds that combine the data with other information such as time, maps or other datasets – and potentially to discover hidden patterns that may not be obvious from the raw information.

Transparent journalism triumphs at the Knights news challenge

Congratulations to Martin Moore and Sir Tim Berners Lee who were part winners of the Knights News challenge .

They have recieved $350,000 for their project Transparent journalism which aims to

design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging

The project gives an example

a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data - the “story behind the story” - to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list.