When is a dataset not a dataset? How many of the now 3241 datasets listed as part of are easy to open up and play with? How many are tables for computers to analyse, instead of PDF reports for people to read?

The  filled a Channel 4 office with journalists and developers on the final Friday in January. Our aim was to tell new stories with open data. Attendees already had form - the 麻豆社's Martin Rosenbaum, and data journalism teams from the Times, the Guardian, and the FT. judged our attempts in his role as head of hosts , alongside My Society boss Tom Steinberg. They to my team's analysis of Tory candidates. But another project promised to shed light on public data in the UK.

was part of a team that looked into the quality of data.gov.uk. Although data.gov.uk advertises itself as a database of open datasets, many of the entries are . He built a prototype format checker that invites people to go through datasets and record the file format. You can listen to him explaining the checker to me and to the hackday, or reuse under the .

On Wednesday February 3^rd, he put a completed quality checker online. On that Thursday, the crowd had gone through data.gov.uk and marked up all of the datasets.

Tom posted his initial breakdown to the data.gov.uk community on March 20th:

HTML -	252
XML -	5
Word -	4
RTF -	1
OpenOffice -	1
Something odd -	85
JSON -	9
Nothing there! -	190
CSV -	12
Multiple formats -	1211
PDF -	468
RDF -	10
Excel -	408
TOTAL -	2656

Sadly, this is over-optimistic. I've manually checked some of the data that has been categorised as JSON and RDF. Most of it is not actually correctly categorised - either people clicked, say, 'RDF' when they meant to click 'PDF', or they have seen an RSS or Atom feed and categorised it as RDF. What this admittedly imperfect dataset is basically saying is that the vast majority of the 'data' on data.gov.uk is not actually machine-readable data but human-readable documents.

He will be at the this weekend, where he will speak about and might do the analysis, which he told me was the most important part. When done, it will be very interesting indeed to read it.