“We have a team of developers going through the data now – and we’ll let you know here what we learn as and when we learn it.” If you had any doubt over the concept of ‘programmer as journalist’, that quote above from The Guardian’s liveblog of the opening of the COINS database gives you a preview of things to
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This looks like an excellent start. The Coalition Government has just published the COINS database, which is the detailed database of Government spending:
The release of COINS data is just the first step in the Government’s commitment to data transparency on Government spending.
You can get the database from the data.gov website here. There are explanations to help you get to grips with it here.
Tim Almond notes (via chat) that it is a 68mb zipped file which extracts to 4GB, i.e., huge. It will require significant database tools to get to grips with this, but I’m predicting that easier ways of querying may be created by someone in 48 hours.
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