You hug your data.  You don’t want to let it go until you have made a beautiful web site for it.  Well I want to suggest that, yes make a beautiful website, but first give us the unadulterated data, we want the unadulterated data, we have to ask for raw data now.

Tim Berners-Lee’s impassioned manifesto for linked data he gave at TED earlier this year is well worth watching.  And now it’s coming close to home:

The Prime Minister has announced the appointment of the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee as expert adviser on public information delivery…  Sir Tim Berners-Lee … will head a panel of experts who will advise the Minister for the Cabinet Office on how government can best use the internet to make non-personal public data as widely available as possible.

He will oversee the work to create a single online point of access for government held public data and develop proposals to extend access to data from the wider public sector, including selecting and implementing common standards. He will also help drive the use of the internet to improve government consultation processes.

This could be interesting.