Government to publish entire spending database

Public will have free access to the 120GB Combined Online Information System database

The government will tomorrow give the public free access to its accounting books for the first time, publishing the entire contents of its spending database – a total of 24m individual entries documenting where public money comes from, what it is spent on and whose pocket it ends up in.

The opening up of the public books offers a unique insight into the everyday running of government and has been widely welcomed by campaigners for open democracy. But it is proving controversial in Whitehall. Some ministers have expressed ill-ease about the transparency it will bring, exposing every single spending decision they make.

The complex, 120GB Combined Online Information System (Coins) database won't, however, be accessible to the public until an industry has emerged to analyse and digest the information. Tomorrow's data is being released in raw format, without the sophisticated software needed to access it. In opposition, the Tories had suggested that such a release could stimulate an industry to analyse and create online services from it, worth up to £6bn a year.

Continued at link.

I didn't find a thread on this yet and found it worth sharing for sure. That's a lot of GB's for information. Now to get it delved through and hope it's not tweaked. It is plausible even with that much data.

Either way I think this could be a good thing and lets get to crunching numbers!

Whatdya think?

Originally posted by Crossfate

Either way I think this could be a good thing and lets get to crunching numbers!

Whatdya think?

since you missed this bit in your own post, here is it again.

The complex, 120GB Combined Online Information System (Coins) database won't, however, be accessible to the public until an industry has emerged to analyse and digest the information. Tomorrow's data is being released in raw format, without the sophisticated software needed to access it. In opposition, the Tories had suggested that such a release could stimulate an industry to analyse and create online services from it, worth up to £6bn a year.

Good luck with crunching numbers you can't access.

reply to post by Grey Magic


I didn't miss it.

I just hope it's a matter of when I get to crunch those numbers.