The Board will also be responsible for setting open data standards across the public sector, publishing further datasets on the basis of public demand, and – in conjunction with the Ministry of Justice – will further develop the Right to Data and advise on its implementation.
It is too much of a stretch to agree with John Perry Barlow, the internet rights pioneer who died this week, when he quipped that "relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds"; but it does not help when it appears that everything the public sector does with the huge datasets it has will be overseen by the minister for fun.
Finally, the dataset also indicates the public sector share of health expenditure.
We've just had the salaries of everyone in the public sector earning more than the prime minister - and there are other major datasets to come.
Some individual European Union member states have already started making public sector data available, including the U.K. and France, which have created portals where available datasets can be searched, requests for data can be submitted and apps that are making use of public data can be found.
Transparency is a new way of operating and the public sector is now more accountable to the public, aided by the release of more than 7,500 datasets, including 800 plus geographical linked datasets via data.gov.uk, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has said.
But it is remarkable that a project that is funded by public funds, that produces a valuable dataset on the environment should, in effect be restricted to elites from the public sector and corporate world.
This is especially important for geospatial datasets that form the backbone of large scale open data publication efforts in many sectors of the economy (e.g., the public sector, the Earth Observation sector).
Open data, particularly that in the public sector, is often big data – for example, the census, information about healthcare or the weather – and making large government datasets open to the public drives innovation from within government and outside.
