Those of us living in 23 selected urban areas in England and Wales can now summon up an on-line map to show how noisy our neighbourhood is.
Kentish Town by night
Kentish Town by day
While the EU Environmental Noise Directive insisted that the government make this information available, this Wednesday the PM announced the introduction of a similar crime mapping scheme. I support the idea of governments making useful information of this nature available to the public in a meaningful way. However, the utility of these maps are limited due to the lack of data portability or APIs. While the UK government seem to support the controlled or sanitised release of data in this way they seem less keen to make the data portable or available for 3rd parties to use via APIs. As I've said on more than one occasion this week, it's not the data itself but the freedom granted to use and organise that's important.
However, in a few exceptional circumstance privacy would be infringed with the wholesale release of raw governmental data. As much as I support the crime mapping idea being able to pinpoint crimes like rape and burglary in exact space and time is one step too far.
