Apologies for the silence in the last couple of weeks due to jury service and catching up with the Browne Review and CSR announcements.
Over the last couple of years the push for release of public data has borne fruit and the Greater London Authority held a really interesting seminar on 27 October to show how data can be made visually informative and help identify social, economic and policy challenges.
There were presentations on the Guardian's Datablog and Datastore, GLA's London Datastore and UCL's research at CASA including SurveyMapper, It's a memory thing and MapTube. There was also a demonstration of two new Google products under development - Public Data Explorer, with a limited number of data tables to look at for the moment, and Fusion Tables which allows upload and customisable sharing of datasets.
An advantage of having public datastores is that web and digital media developers can help provide collective effort to analyse and display data, such as this interactive visualisation on carbon emissions in London from DECC local authority statistics.
