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  • Last year here at TED

  • I asked you to give me your data,

  • to put your data on the web, on the basis

  • that if people put data onto the web --

  • government data, scientific data, community data,

  • whatever it is -- it will be used by other people

  • to do wonderful things, in ways

  • that they never could have imagined.

  • So, today I'm back just to show you a few things,

  • to show you, in fact, there is

  • an open data movement afoot,

  • now, around the world.

  • The cry of "Raw data now!"

  • which I made people make in the auditorium,

  • was heard around the world.

  • So, let's roll the video.

  • A classic story, the first one which lots of people picked up,

  • was when in March -- on March 10th in fact, soon after TED --

  • Paul Clarke, in the U.K. government,

  • blogged, "Oh, I've just got some raw data. Here it is,

  • it's about bicycle accidents."

  • Two days it took the Times Online

  • to make a map, a mashable map --

  • we call these things mash-ups --

  • a mashed-up user interface that allows you to go in there

  • and have a look and find out whether your bicycle

  • route to work was affected.

  • Here's more data, traffic survey data,

  • again, put out by the U.K. government,

  • and because they put it up using the Linked Data standards,

  • then a user could just make a map,

  • just by clicking.

  • Does this data affect things? Well, let's get back to 2008.

  • Look at Zanesville, Ohio.

  • Here's a map a lawyer made. He put on it the water plant,

  • and which houses are there,

  • which houses have been connected to the water.

  • And he got, from other data sources,

  • information to show

  • which houses are occupied by white people.

  • Well, there was too much of a correlation, he felt,

  • between which houses were occupied by white people

  • and which houses had water, and the judge was not impressed either.

  • The judge was not impressed to the tune of 10.9 million dollars.

  • That's the power of taking one piece of data,

  • another piece of data, putting it together,

  • and showing the result.

  • Let's look at some data from the U.K. now.

  • This is U.K. government data, a completely independent site,

  • Where Does My Money Go.

  • It allows anybody to go there and burrow down.

  • You can burrow down by a particular type of spending,

  • or you can go through all the different regions and compare them.

  • So, that's happening in the U.K. with U.K. government data.

  • Yes, certainly you can do it over here.

  • Here's a site which allows you to look at recovery spending

  • in California.

  • Take an arbitrary example, Long Beach, California,

  • you can go and have a look at what recovery money they've been spending

  • on different things such as energy.

  • In fact, this is the graph of the number of data sets

  • in the repositories of data.gov,

  • and data.gov.uk.

  • And I'm delighted to see a great competition

  • between the U.K. in blue, and the U.S. in red.

  • How can you use this stuff?

  • Well, for example, if you have lots of data about places

  • you can take, from a postcode --

  • which is like a zip plus four --

  • for a specific group of houses, you can make paper,

  • print off a paper which has got very, very

  • specific things about the bus stops,

  • the things specifically near you.

  • On a larger scale, this is a mash-up

  • of the data which was released about the Afghan elections.

  • It allows you to set your own criteria

  • for what sort of things you want to look at.

  • The red circles are polling stations,

  • selected by your criteria.

  • And then you can select also other things on the map

  • to see what other factors, like the threat level.

  • So, that was government data.

  • I also talked about community-generated data -- in fact I edited some.

  • This is the wiki map, this is the Open Street Map.

  • "Terrace Theater" I actually put

  • on the map because it wasn't on the map before TED last year.

  • I was not the only person editing the open street map.

  • Each flash on this visualization --

  • put together by ITO World --

  • shows an edit in 2009

  • made to the Open Street Map.

  • Let's now spin the world during the same year.

  • Every flash is an edit. Somebody somewhere

  • looking at the Open Street Map, and realizing it could be better.

  • You can see Europe is ablaze with updates.

  • Some places, perhaps not as much as they should be.

  • Here focusing in on Haiti.

  • The map of Port au-Prince at the end

  • of 2009 was not all it could be,

  • not as good as the map of California.

  • Fortunately, just after the earthquake,

  • GeoEye, a commercial company,

  • released satellite imagery

  • with a license, which allowed

  • the open-source community to use it.

  • This is January, in time lapse,

  • of people editing ... that's the earthquake.

  • After the earthquake, immediately,

  • people all over the world, mappers

  • who wanted to help, and could,

  • looked at that imagery, built the map, quickly building it up.

  • We're focusing now on Port-au-Prince.

  • The light blue is refugee camps these volunteers had spotted from the [satellite images].

  • So, now we have, immediately, a real-time map

  • showing where there are refugee camps --

  • rapidly became the best map

  • to use if you're doing relief work in Port-au-Prince.

  • Witness the fact that it's here on this Garmin device

  • being used by rescue team in Haiti.

  • There's the map showing,

  • on the left-hand side,

  • that hospital -- actually that's a hospital ship.

  • This is a real-time map that shows blocked roads,

  • damaged buildings, refugee camps --

  • it shows things that are needed [for rescue and relief work].

  • So, if you've been involved in that at all,

  • I just wanted to say: Whatever you've been doing,

  • whether you've just been chanting, "Raw data now!"

  • or you've been putting government or scientific data online,

  • I just wanted to take this opportunity to say: Thank you very much,

  • and we have only just started!

  • (Applause)

Last year here at TED

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