Slightly late blog on this one as the event took place on Tuesday night but Hannah and I were running all over London with Jack Daniel’s in tow to give our friends at various publishing houses their first try of the new Jack Daniel’s Barbecue Sauces yesterday.

Held at the MDDA building on Portland Street the event was really my first foray into the open data field and as I don’t profess to be an expert I thought I might just share some of the links used in the meeting to demonstrate the principles and potential of open data:

A good place to start seems to be Tim Berners-Lee giving a TED talk on his view of how open data will shape the future of the internet.

If you’re partial to a nice graphic, and I certainly am, then check out this baby from the Sunlight Foundation to demonstrate how open data policies can be used by and influence society.

For me, by far the best use of open data demonstrated on Tuesday was an app called San Francisco Trees which uses data that the council already had about when and where trees had been planted, to create an iPhone app that allows users to get data on any tree they happen to be standing in front of.

The same company has created apps for finding pharmacies, doctors and postboxes but that seems a lot less fun to me.

This is an example of asking permission to use data that a public body has but doesn’t bother to share, which seems to me to be an important part of the open data movement. In a similar move the Open Election Data project is seeking to gather election data that councils hold as standard into one easy to access place.

Open data can also inspire people to gather data themselves; as in the case of open streetmap, a response to other online mapping tools not giving access to their data. Instead users have mapped large parts of the world themselves and have shared the data freely for use by the public and developers.

What struck me on Tuesday night was that even though I thought I had access to a lot of data, I don’t, at least not in a ‘useful’ form. The talk opened with the example of the Transport for London website which publishes massive amounts of information every day about tube, train and bus times. Yet this data is only accessible on the platform of the TFL’s own website. If you want to use it to compare house prices, crime rates and public transport connectivity for example, you can’t.

With lesson number on learnt I’m very much looking forward to next month’s meet up and  getting to grips with where open data can really take us.