Today sees the launch of the public beta of data.gov.uk. It's not often you can say the government has done something thoroughly enlightened of which you can feel proud, but today is one of those days. By all accounts the advocacy of Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been hugely important to making this happen - as a top-level persuader, agent of change inside the civil service and public mouthpiece. Maybe the government thought it would do them no harm in an election year to be associated with the star qualities of the web's inventor while he's basking in the afterglow last year's 20th anniversary. But who cares what the motivation is? This is good for lots of reasons:

• The government is giving the public back the data that we have generated and paid for, or that the government has generated with our money. You'd think that was a no-brainer, but apparently we're a few steps ahead of the USA, who have much less of a tradition of government secrecy than we do.
• They're actively and sincerely seeking creative collaboration from developers in generating apps and view which will help the public make sense of their data. Probably my favourite so far is Where Does My Money Go?, a dynamic infographic showing the growth of government spending and its distribution around different areas. It's a brilliantly executed example of data-driven graphical storytelling, and one which could genuinely help voters understand issues which are often clouded by rhetoric and politics.
• The initiative not only opens up data but uses a number of open-source platforms to facilitate that, providing very welcome advocacy for their uptake.
• data.gov.uk have created Crown Copyright to enshrine an open licence around the data, and one that's deliberately interoperable with Creative Commons 3.0, once again driving awareness and uptake of models for opening up IP.

Taken together, this should stimulate innovation around these data models, innovation in technology and better public engagement with the political questions that sit behind the data. Three cheers.
Matthew