It is a great step forward to see the government’s new data portal data.gov.uk finally go live.
The site seeks to aggregate information and data from a variety of sources, that can be searched by category and keyword.
There is a growing master list of datasets or you can search by common tags, just as you can a weblog, to find resources and subjects you are interested in.
For example, search for data on children, of which there are currently 305 datasets available, then use the tags and subsets to look for average class sizes. This reveals a wealth of published information from a variety existing sources.
This example produced information from the school census published by the Office of National Statistics. Not only class sizes, but a range of other analysis too.
The number of children known to be eligible for free school meals for example, as a percentage of all registered children.
2005 17%
2006 16.1%
2007 15.9%
As a marker for an improving economy – this is perhaps not a great indicator, but as evidence of a continued need for school meals and persistent drive on nutrition information – it’s better.
Looking for data to produce a report, or argue for a new service? The resource that is data.gov.uk is a first stopping point.