This article was taken from the June 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
If states opened their data archives to the public, they could generate $3 trillion (£1.79 trillion) a year for the world economy, according to consulting firm McKinsey, as companies found profitable ways to use that data. "Say you're a road haulage firm," says economist Rufus Pollock, cofounder of Cambridge-based non-profit the Open Knowledge Foundation. "A map that routes you through traffic better, or better information on the weather -- that's going to allow you to run your business better."
The UK has publicly released over 10,000 free data sets, ranking it first in two independent worldwide studies of open-data policies. The first is the Open Data Barometer, published by the non-profit World Wide Web Foundation, which looked at how much and what type of data was accessible and its positive impacts. The study also assessed whether countries could turn data sets into products and platforms. Countries were then scored on a 0-100 scale. The second, the Open Data Index, was conducted by the Open Knowledge Foundation. It surveyed over 1,300 people in 70 countries about their access to 10 key data sets, including government spending and the national map.
The UK scored 99 for its government's data-supporting resources, and 92 for open data's economic impacts, but it dips to 52 for using its data for social good. "How can data support the non-profit sector?" asks Tim Davies, research coordinator for the World Wide Web Foundation. "That's certainly an area to focus on improving."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
