Open Tech 2009

I spent today at Open Tech 2009, mainly listening to talks on Open data. Here's some highlights while they're fresh in my mind:

• A bunch on guys are trying to shame the Royal Mail into giving open access to postcode to Latitude/Longitude mapping (currently you have to pay to access this data) by creating a web site www.ernestmarples.com which does it for you (it seems to be broken at the moment mind you). They're getting the data via "screen scraping" and they're encouraging us to build applications using the data.

• Some people within central government are trying to essentially create the equivalent of BBC Backstage but for government data. They're promising to put a lot of data out there over the next few months in the hope that we'll demonstrate good uses for it.

• The Open Knowledge Foundation appear to be doing a lot of interesting stuff.

• Some people at Open Data Commons, working alongside the Open Knowledge Foundation, have been working on a set of legal 'tools' to help us provide and use open data.

• The Guardian is also opening up its data in interesting ways. The Guardian Open Platform provides a suite of services that make it possible for partners to build applications with the Guardian. That includes searching their entire news archive, and re-using data their reporters have collected while researching stories. They're also making good use of "crowdsourcing" (a buzzword which was much in evidence today) to investigate MPs' expenses.

All in all in a very useful day of which the above is just a few bits I wrote down for further investigation but there was a lot more that was interesting and pretty much every talk I went to was well worth it.

And the other attendees were an interesting bunch too. I met someone I know vaguely (he used to work for RedHat). Always nice to find at least one familiar face.

Oh, and I was also subject to my favourite line "Paul Oldham, oh yes, I've heard of you" from a random person I didn't know at all ...