On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 17:14 +0100, Brough, Tom wrote: > Errm Im no expert but we do have the freedom of information act. (FOIA), so > I would think it would qualify under that as HMSO is a government > organisation ? Of course you may need every user to submit there own FOIA > request before using the app to make it legal, but if it helps diabetics and > enough people submit a request (which is a pain to process), they will get > the message and make it freely available (preferably in an open standard > format and/or XML), well possibly.
Slowly progressing with this, I've discovered that this and other government-collected data is governed by the European Directive on the re-use of public sector information (directive 2003/98/EC, http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/pri/en/oj/dat/2003/l_345/l_34520031231en00900096.pdf ) which required implementation at national level by July 2005. The base assumption made in this document is that governments will charge for data - though the preamble has the pious wish that they won't charge beyond distribution costs (preamble, paragraph 14), the actual act just says 'income.. shall not exceed cost of collection, production, reproduction and dissemination together with a reasonable return on investment' (article 6). There is a clause (article 7) saying they have to 'ensure applicants for reuse of documents are informed of available means of redress relating to decisions of practices affecting them', so I have written asking to be told my means of redress. I've also found where one other countries similar data should be - the Italian data should be on http://inn.ingrm.it/inran/banche_dati ; unfortunately, the link is non-existent. I've written asking why. As an aside, I'm not sure it helps that this site is free software (plone) any more than it helped to find that the page locking me out from access to the British data was using Shibboleth.. It would be nice if free data and free software had more of an inherent connection than they evidently do :-( Graham _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list Fsfe-uk@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
