Making a difference with data

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Broken Address: from splorp on flickr. "][/caption]

It seems odd that different parts of government think of addresses in different ways.  Some use postcodes to identify places, others use the National Land and Property Gazetteer, list of "universal property reference numbers" (UPRNs) - others use mapping geospatial information.

In December Eric Pickles - the Secretary of State for Local Government - decided to change this and create a single database called Geoplace.

Government recognises the substantial social and economic benefits that a single definitive national spatial address register would bring. It is therefore significantly improving on the historic arrangements in which there are multiple sources of addressing information.

To deliver this, Ordnance Survey and the Local Government Group have entered into a joint venture partnership, 'GeoPlace' from which spatial address products will be created. Subject to approval from the Office of Fair Trading, it will combine local government's address and streets gazetteers, the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) and the National Street Gazetteer (NSG) with Ordnance Survey's OS MasterMap® Address Layer 2.

Good call - but it would be even better news if it included postcodes and the property ownership and value information from the Land Registry  was also released - all on an open License as open data.

Why? It isn't just the public sector that cares about who own our land - we d, housing associations do, communities groups interested in community asset transfer do.  The information in GeoPlace needs a license which means that no one is prevented from these people benefiting.

The Land Registry holds information on the titles to almost all properties in England and Wales. For a fee individual citizens can find out who owns what, but the liscense  explicitly forbid users from using and sharing this data in an organised way online:

4.1.2 use or attempt to use any automated software agents (including without limitation, any screen scraper, spider or other web crawler) to access the System or to search, copy or monitor, display or obtain links to any part of the System.

4.1.3 use the System to copy or display the Data and information for display on any other website.

If this information were freely available, it would be easier for local authorities or private citizens to determine the pattern of property ownership within an area.   If the data were freely available systems could be build which save other costs to the public purse, for example it could be used by local authorities prevent benefit fraud.

At the moment the Land registry is required to charge people, although the Power of Information Task Force argued that making charged for data freely available could generate far more benefit to the tax payer than it costs.  This comes through both potential savings from improving the way services are delivered and tax generated by new businesses creating new products with the data.

The key thing about this data being open is it will provide the foundations of a nationally available  infrastructure of information about what's where and who owns it.