Freed Our Data?

It's great news that the Government has launched data.gov.uk. The principle that data created by the state, often using tax revenue, should be freely available to citizens to re-use is sound. Some of the apps that today's launch suggested could be built off the data-sets now released are impressive.

But the 'crown jewels' - Ordnance Survey geographic data that is the subject of the Guardian's long-running Free Our Data campaign - remain locked down. There is a pressing question with permitting free re-use of that data though, because of it's inherent value. Where a data-set exists that commercial entities want to exploit for profit (rather than 'bedroom developers' want to exploit out of simple interest or value to a niche community) it seems odd to do away with the chance of taking advantage of that commercial interest.

The fact the data at data.gov.uk is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence raises the possibility of government going a step further and limiting the licensing of the data to non-commercial use.

Up until now the debate has been played out in largely binary terms - either data-sets should or should not be released. Surely there is a usual distinction to be drawn between non-commercial and commercial use which could inform the release of data-sets that government considers to be inherently more valuable than those already released at data.gov.uk.