Re: [Fsfe-uk] [OT-ish] Government food data

[graham]

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