Open Data in the United Kingdom

There have been campaigns in the United Kingdom for its government to open up the large amounts of data it has for greater public usage without prohibitively large fees. Currently some UK public sector data are released under a Creative Commons compatible licence.

Crown Copyright has been a long-standing copyright protection applied to official works, and at times artistic works, produced under royal or official supervision. The Guardian newspaper's Technology section began a "Free Our Data" campaign, calling for data gathered by authorities at public expense to be made freely available for reuse by individuals. In 2010 with the creation of the Open Government Licence and the Data.gov.uk site it appeared that the campaign had been mostly successful. On 12 January 2011 the Coalition Government revealed that it was planning to establish a Public Data Corporation (PDC). The goal being to make the UK Government data provided in a much more consistent fashion as well as freeing more data for public and commercial use. The idea of the PDC was later dropped in favour of grouping a number of government data providing organisations to form the Public Data Group.

In 2010 the UK Government created the Open Government Licence, and public bodies can now opt to publish their Crown Copyright material under this licence. Material marked in this way is available under a free, perpetual licence without restrictions beyond attribution. This new licence was based on, and designed to work with the Creative Commons licences. Version 2.0 of the licence was released in June 2013 and it was accompanied by a new logo which "at a glance, shows that information can be used and re-used under open licensing".

Crown Copyright is the default copyright applied to all government department published documents.

The Met Office is the national weather service. Its main role is to produce forecast models by gathering all the information from weather satellites in space and observations on earth. The principal weather products for UK customers are 36-hour forecasts from the newly-operational 1.5 km resolution UKV model covering the UK and surroundings (replacing the 4 km model), 48-hour forecasts from the 12 km resolution NAE model covering Europe and the North Atlantic, and 144-hour forecasts from the 25 km resolution global model (replacing the 40 km global model). A wide range of other products for other regions of the globe are sold to customers abroad, provided for MOD operations abroad or provided free to developing countries in Africa. This main bulk of data are then passed on to companies who acquire it. Data are stored in the Met Office's own PP-format. The Met Office held the base data involved in the Climatic Research Unit hacking incident and released information to the public alongside the Climatic Research Unit when pressed.

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