UK's Data.Gov Site Officially Launched

In beta since September, data.gov.uk was officially launched yesterday. See the BBC News story, Tim Berners-Lee unveils government data project. ReadWriteWeb says the UK site puts the US Data.Gov site to shame, noting that the UK site already has more than three times as many data sets than the US site currently offers.

The UK government has been a big supporter of innovation built on top of public data ... The U.S. government, on the other hand, has been lackluster in its move to open data to facilitate outside innovation. If Twitter is the poster child for building a thriving ecosystem around a streaming set of data, then the Obama administration has earned about 140 characters worth of praise for its fledgling efforts so far. The U.S. government's efforts to advance agencies' use of cloud computing may work in conjunction with opening data to the public and thus may improve the state of things, but time will tell.

Perhaps the US Data.Gov developers need to study the UK's Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government which outlined the plans that led to the creation of the new site under Berners-Lee's guidance. [JH]