Aussies unleash data flood

Geeks across Australia are having a field day creating applications (apps) as the country's state and federal governments release swathes of data to the public.

Proponents of the open-government plan claim the apps could spark scandals as big as Utegate, in which an Australian Treasury official forged an email that falsely alleged the Prime Minister and Treasurer acted improperly on behalf of a car dealer.

Next Saturday, entries close for the Australian Government's MashUp Australia competition, which tasked developers with making public-sector information more accessible and usable through new web applications and mashups.

Several of the apps to come out of the initiative have already been unveiled in beta form. The apps can be accessed from both computers and mobile phones.

They include an app for directories showing public services closest to the user's address, an app to compare the rates of various crimes in locations across NSW, a broadband locator to help people decide on an ISP and even an app to find the nearest public barbecue.

To help spark interest in the competition, the Government 2.0 Taskforce brought an army of 150 geeks together in Canberra over the weekend for a coding marathon called Govhack.

Participants formed teams to develop and demonstrate their applications and, at the end of the event, a panel decided that the best mashup was LobbyClue, which combines data from the lobbyist register, contract notices, business names and other information to produce visual representations of relationships between government organisations and businesses.

"I think all of the government people in the room shivered," GovHack organiser John Allsopp said.

Other notable apps created on the weekend include It's Buggered Mate (reporting damaged public facilities directly to the relevant council), Know Where You Live (providing statistics on Sydney suburbs based on their postcodes) and Rate a Loo (identifying public toilets in the user's immediate area).

Separately, earlier this year a developer released an iPhone app, FoodWatch NSW, which tells users if a nearby restaurant has been fined for breach of food safety standards. The app uses data from the NSW Food Authority's website.

"If it's stuck in a room somewhere in Canberra, how valuable is that data? And even if it was just a whole lot of Excel spreadsheets on the web, how many people are capable of taking that information and making sense of it?" Allsopp said.

"I think we'll see a major story like Utegate come from things that have been enabled by this increasingly available data and tools that are built on top of it.

"Once you open this stuff up, you can't put the genie back in the bottle."

Even the NSW Government, which as recently as March was attempting to shut down mobile train timetable apps using copyright law, is going app-crazy.

It has given the public access to a plethora of government agency data sets and is encouraging anyone to transform them into apps.

NSW Labor MLC Penny Sharpe is driving the NSW initiative with Commerce Minister Jodi McKay.

Sharpe said rules for the NSW Government's own app competition, apps4nsw, would be announced shortly.

She said about 15 sets of data had been made available so far and this was set to expand over time.

"People will use it in ways that we haven't even contemplated yet - and that's a good thing," she said.

- © Fairfax NZ News