Open Data Round Up: 31/01/14

A belated Happy New Year from everyone at Horizon! Here’s a round up of some of the most interesting open data stories from January 2014:

• Nesta’s recent report “Which Doctors Take Up Promising Ideas: Insights from Open Data” uses open data to analyse early adoption of promising new ideas across primary health care in England. Nesta argue that open data can help people understand differences in service as well as inform patient and practitioner priorities and choices.

• Huawei have announced that they are to collaborate with Imperial College London on the creation of a Data Science Innovation Laboratory. The Lab will bring together experts from across Imperial’s faculties and Huawei researchers to harness data science research and develop new applications in fields such as smart cities, energy and healthcare.

• The World Bank has launched a new open data tool which provides comparative data on education around the world. The Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) web tool helps countries collect and analyse information on their education policies, benchmark themselves against other countries, and prioritize areas for reform.

• Paul Maltby, Director of Open Data and Government Innovation at the Cabinet Office has written a post on the ways in which open data is being used in the UK government for the Civil Service Quarterly blog. The post outlines how open data will help reform public services, as well as improve accountability and generate economic growth.

Finally, Open Data Day 2014 takes place on the 22nd February – a map and more information on the events taking place can be found on the International Open Data Day website.