In January, the government launched a new website aimed at making government information more accessible across the web. Inspired by a similar US website launched by the Obama administration, data.gov.uk provides free and easy access to large amounts of official data. The idea is that companies and organisations can use this information in new and innovative ways not provided for by the authorities.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the World Wide Web, led on the project. In the 1990s, Berners-Lee devised a way to use the internet that would help make it easier to share information about physics with other researchers, laying the foundations for the World Wide Web. He has adopted a similar approach with data.gov.uk, using an evolving standard for sharing information called the ‘semantic’ web.