The UK and US Governments Have the Most Open Data in the World

A certain level of transparency in government is beneficial to democracy. It can help increase accountability, efficiency, and trust in the institutions that make decisions affecting us all. A key part of this is open data—making data available at no cost and in a useable format.

In 2013, G8 countries signed the Open ​Data​ Charter to work toward that goal, with a promise to make public sector data "open by default." In 2014, the UN called for a "dat​a revolution."

Keeping an eye on these initiatives is the World Wide Web Foundation, founded by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. The foundation has released its second Open Data Barometer report, and once again it puts the UK at the top of ​the tables, with the US in second place.

That's not a massive surprise. As the report points out, many governments do not make information on how public money is spent or how services are performing accessible at all. Bottom of the tables, which include 86 countries, are Myanmar and Haiti. Many African nations find themselves among the lower rankings.

Across the entire sample, the report sta​tes that "just eight percent publish open data on government spending, six percent publish open data on government contracts, and a mere three percent publish open data on the ownership of companies."

The UK and US, as the forerunners, have some progress to be proud of. The UK is praised for opening up its company register and land titles (records of who owns a piece of land), and both are applauded for making public spending data, legislation, and maps open. The report also states that, "Canada and the UK were the only countries to take the important step of promising to prepare and publish a comprehensive data inventory, so that citizens can find out exactly what data the government is holding." Canada is ranked a reasonably respectable eighth in the barometer.

Jeni Tennison, technical director at the London-based Open Data Institute (also co-founded by Berners-Lee), told me it was not unexpected to see the UK at the top of the barometer again. "We in the UK have been a very early adopter of open data," she said. "The open data movement in the UK has been going for at least five years; we had the data.go​v.uk portal for accessing government datasets available from 2010, so it's something we have been leading and it is expected that we'd be top of the Barometer."

Data.gov.uk, launched in beta in 2010, collects non-personal, non-sensitive government data in one place for anyone to re-use for free.

But there's no need to get complacent even at the top of the list, because there remains work to be done. The report criticises the UK for selling off the "vitally important" Postal Address File, which documents 29 million addresses, when it privatised the Royal Mail service. Additionally, it references the government's​ own note that some datasets including information on spending by government departments are out of date.

Tennison added that geographical data from mapping agency Ordnance Survey is still not open, a situation that has provoked the ir​e of commercial competitors.

Her organisation has set out an "open data road​map" for the UK to continue to push progress, including steps such as establishing a framework, opening up more data of better quality, and finally encouraging more people to actually put the available data to use.

Open data is not the only indicator of open g​overnment, and it's worth remembering that the UK and US did not perform quite so well in the Web Foundation's 2014 We​b Index.

But Tennison emphasised the role of open data in the concept of open government as a whole. "It fits into a wider picture of open government," she said. "Open government covers things like transparency and accountability; it encompasses things like open policymaking. Open data is an important component for supporting those things."

After all, without access to the information by which decisions are made, it's hard to have a high degree of transparency.