Sir Nigel Shadbolt here. I saw him give a talk

about openness at the British Library just recently I thought he'd be a

spectacular addition to this particular meeting

Nigel's list of accolades so long that if I read them out we'd be here

till the lunchtime

and I think hopefully is going to be touching on

many of the highlights today. With Sir Tim berners-Lee he recently founded the

Open Data

institute. Another big development is with the government data portal where

again I think

with them Tim berners-lee you were heavily involved in in founding that

initiative

and that's led to a spectacular really transformation

in the openness of data associated with government

and making giving the public much greater access

to that data in a really much more transparent

way. And that

data portal is really the foundation for some of our own activities within the

Museum

associated with a net the NHM data portal

the we'll be hearing about this afternoon. So I'm with that

is my pleasure to am hand over to Nigel Shadbolt.

[Nigel] okay

well thank you. Its a real pleasure to be here. I'm really gonna be talking today

I suppose you did see

to what extent I'm preaching to the choir but I'm really going to be talking

about

the point of the Open Data movement

why is important, what results we are finding and ready to enjoy all of you here

to really take that step to wherever possible.

Imagine a releasing your data under

open licenses as open data now I kinda represent to us you should really

the Open Data Institute, which was just open up literally

in the last nine months a has been running since

October last year and also

may day job as professor at the University Southampton in electronics

computer science

where I i've been working for a number of years on next-generation web

technology to think of ways in which we could integrate data into the web

and much more natural way.

First of all I'd like to persuade people that this stuff around open crowd-sourcing really can be material and we had some

examples around the

the an actual estimate this is one of my favorites is quite often used

its not a high resolution image here but to say that

but when the a Haitian earthquake hit in January 2010

there was no map is haiti have any detail didn't exist.

One of the extraordinary things that happened is over a period of 12 days

software open source software open standards

and a huge amount of crowd-sourcing went in

and literally with GPS, with hand-held mobiles, with laptops

they were uploading, literally walking the streets of this devastated capital.

Within 12 days they had produced a detailed map

which is essential actually to organise the

humanitarian relief.

When you see the video that was put together that it's really one of those

kind of

these hair raising moments on the back of your head, as this is this is a

powerful new source

of capability. It's not historically new if we go back to

Nightingale, for example, the wonderful work she did in

cataloging mortality in the Crimean War.

There is a brilliant infographics, by the way. This is the Cox diagram which

represents deaths through

a particular year and the observation crushing the obvious now was

that most people were dying out there through hospital-acquired infections

diseases in the battlefield they weren't dying

directly through and on the battlefield. Snow's work on the spread of cholera

where again he began to collect mortality statistics

put it on a map an each of these black blocks is a bit of a personal tragedy

it's a

family death and these houses here

clearly associating with people pumped their water. This pump here

was locked. They actually came to a view

that cholera was probably water-borne it hadn't been widely

accepted a ttaht point. So the usage data at scale

can be transformational has been in history and and it's no less true now of

course

if we sink a prototypical example the sequencing of the human genome

the fact that data is available for all to do

and research how they will. That's a huge

gift to humanity and not just the fact that data is available but the whole

source

of open signs that arise from it is incredibly fast-moving. So this is a

actually a DNA sequence, a piece of the genome also

of E. coli. It was the E. coli outbreak that occurred, in new member those

you remember that salad and lettuce instances in Holland and Germany. It was a huge panic, people getting very

very ill with an acute form of

a of poisoning and

within days a group in China

had sequenced that particular sample was spreading the information around the

web people starting to look compare against

reference models E. coli, get some idea of what the

differences were between this and standard references models to think about

treatments.

That is illustrative of both

the way in which the state could be put to use and the rapidity of putting it to

use

and sometimes when you all kinda arguing with people and the CEOs and politicians

about why do this

you take examples that have been profoundly destructive and

transformational because

the underpinning IP,

the underpinning data was made freely available the underpinning standards. In

the case the World Wide Web

this man Tim berners-Lee, who I'm

privileged to work with, he gave those standards to the world

via CERN and they

are the fundamental protocols that allow us to

build the construct that is the World Wide Web, on top of

existing Internet protocols or the GPS signal that silly wasn't developed

with commercial applications in mind but when the decision was taken

to switch of the blocking to switch that on as a commercially available

public good, huge amounts of value flowed.

It's inconceivable now a that

would be switched off except from possibly

natural disasters solar flares frying it down.

But in a real sense we've come to expect in just the way we come to expect

with

the work that was done with

calculating longitude or working out Meridian time

that these things are public got certain data made available

has very white utility.

The story that I like to tell it's not just about the data that this is virtuous circle

of data for sure but standards

agreeing formats in which there is no proprietary interest

in which to represent the data. Agreeing licenses that don't put bizarre

restrictions on using the information

One example of a government that released its data

thinking it was doing the right thing and had one clause in its license said

do not use this data to bring the government into disrepute

what possible use

for most system activists is data without restriction

Open source open participation

The sum total at these elements of open are former open innovation

that both accelerates and widens impact. So this is why we're excited by this why

spend my time

kinda promoting this this whole approach

just to be clear on open data is data that is

available for anyone to use for any purpose at no cost

and there isn't kind of slightly open

It is either available in these Terms appropriate licensing or not.

And just to illustrate this scale of the journey

when we began this word back in 2009 under the last government

Tim and I a came up with the wiz which was to imagine

we would all have the ability to have a local papers give us a little

supplement the

Post code paper, this would be a little supplement your local paper and it

would be

your postcode give you all the public data held about you

by government local government everything from your school attainment

rates to when the buses ran to where the b-cycle points were

to how frequently the potholes filled. The whole

nine yards. We put this together actually

at The Guardian a we assemble a whole range data produced this

lovely a

7-10 page document took too long to actually

a cabinet meeting put it on the table in all the politicians thought the job was

done

we pointed out that eighty-five percent of the content

on that newspaper was illegally reproduced okay

we had broken Crown copyright we weren't allowed to use tool

post goes cause we had to pay for them at that stage the Ordnance Survey

whole raft reasons some sane some less sane

about why that data couldn't be reused in an open format

and the the change has been remarkable that in 12 weeks we had the beginning

over

open data portal, data.gov.uk, which back in the day

up was still is a beta site. One of the things that we

kind of took government on a journey was to match in that the notion of a

perpetual beater

a site that is on the continuing development does not expose you to