The US has led the way in making government information free and open, with the launch of it’s data.gov website.

If there has been a clear demonstrator of the advantages, providing government information for free presents, it has been Hans Rosling. His gapminder website has proven many a misconception incorrect.

It hasn’t taken long for Google to join in too.

Back in the UK though, the  Power of Information Task Force flagged up that one of the main problems with UK government information is finding out what has been published, what form it is in, and how it can be used; the Cabinet Office is looking at how they might do this.

Any solution must support open standards and would ideally be open source, but there are a couple of other questions we are pondering at the moment:

• What characteristics would be most useful to you – feeds (ATOM or RSS) or bulk download by e.g. FTP, etc?
• Should this be an index or a repository?
• Should this serve particular types of data e.g. XML, JSON or RDF?
• What examples should we be looking at (beyond data.gov e.g. http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/data)?
• Does this need its own domain, or should it sit on an existing supersite (e.g.  http://direct.gov.uk)

Please let the Cabinet Office Digital Engagement team know any and all thoughts – they will pick up twitter comments with #poit or #opendata. In the meantime, you can find some of the government’s published data sources on this  data wiki (thanks to Rewired State).