Last night I was at the Free Our Data? discussion at the University of Manchester, running as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2007. This was interesting, not least because I have been thinking about this debate purely in terms of geographical data, yet other types of data bring other issues and concerns. The question-mark is important, as it represents the crux of this evening’s debate. Should public sector data be available for free, or freely available?

Exposing our data using WFS has certainly prompted some debate, which is good! Particular thanks go out to Andrew Larcombe, who put together a great OpenLayers page, with some nice ajax touches, and a clever mechanism that clusters nearby sites together and reduces the load on the server. We had a few requests to release this data by wms as well, so here is the request for that. The process of doing this has thrown up some challenges, which I think are mostly down to my ignorance than anything else!

The decision to move towards opensource software is one that more and more organisations are making, and there are many reasons for doing so. We are moving along the route slowly, but surely. Most of our back-end and infrastructure software is now opensource, whilst we are still investigating alternatives to the mainly closed source desktop packages. Today, I read a series of posts about making the difficult choice between different opensource solutions.