Data Pimpage

A friend of mine has organised a panel debate on the subject of :"Free our Data". The blurb runs as thus:

"Should social researchers have unlimited access to the data that Government collects about individual UK citizens? Would the benefits of better evidence on which to base social policy outweigh concerns about privacy? Experts from academia and government will offer their views and respond to questions from the audience."

Although the panel is in the context of social research free access is to data is something I've been interested in for a long time. For example why can't I get access to the GMPTE bus route data in a machine readable form^*? People have achieved some really neat things screen scraping data from public websites, just imagine what they could do with the raw data.

You can register for the discussion here

^*I've just put a FOI request in. We shall see.