As you may well have seen, last Thursday the Greater London Authorities announced the new London Datastore:

• http://data.london.gov.uk/

From the press release:

The Mayor of London will unveil plans for the capital’s first open data project which will see large amounts of previously unavailable information from City Hall released online.

Similar to the hugely successful ‘Apps for the Democracy’ project in the United States the Mayor will be joined by President Barack Obama’s Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Linda Cureton, Chief Information Officer, NASA during a rare live web link up with the world’s largest electronics show, CES, in Las Vegas.

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, also announced that there will be £200k from Channel Four’s 4IP to encourage people to make new useful services based on the data – which is excellent news!

Picking up from our international round up of open data on cities from last autumn, we’ve updated the package page on CKAN:

• http://ckan.net/package/city-london

Is the data open? Though they don’t use a license or legal tool to make the data open, their Terms and Conditions appear to make the data open as in the Open Knowledge Definition. Nevertheless it would be good if they made this more explicit by using a legal tool such as the PDDL, ODbL, or CC0!

What data have they released? Speaking with Chris Taggart of Openly Local last week, we expected a fair few datasets to be sliced from existing sources such as the Office of National Statistics. But as Chris notes on his blog, it looks like there are plans to open up a lot more data, including new data from from Transport for London!

For more see:

• London unveils digital datastore, BBC News
• Boris Johnson to launch London ‘Datastore’ with hundreds of sets of data, Guardian
• London opens up data with online scheme, Financial Times
• Las Vegas industry event – or London data store launch?, Brian Hoadley
• Tinkering With Timetric – London Datastore Borough Population Data from Tony Hirst, Open University
• The GLA and open data: did he really say that?, Chris Taggart, Openly Local

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