UK government data mash-up

My collaborators Nick Jones and Peter Mucha separately e-mailed me to let me know about the new UK government data mash-up.

Basically, the UK government has launched a competition to find innovative ways of using the mass of data it collects. Towards this end, they have released (in SQL format) a ton of data from the National Health Service and other interesting parts of their bureaucracy.

While there will presumably be many cooks stirring this pot, I still am quite pleased to have access to cool data for student projects. (Currently, I really need to recruit somebody to help me study the longitudinal cabinet data that I got from Brian Uzzi...)

Also, the UK government is being very smart to release the data in this fashion. Kudos!