Continuing my exploration of what is and isn’t acceptable around the edges of doing stuff with other people’s data(?!), the Guardian datastore have just published a Google spreadsheet containing partial details of MPs’ expenses data over the period July-Decoember 2009 (MPs’ expenses: every claim from July to December 2009):

thanks to the work of Guardian developer Daniel Vydra and his team, we’ve managed to scrape the entire lot out of the Commons website for you as a downloadable spreadsheet. You cannot get this anywhere else.

In sharing the data, the Guardian folks have opted to share the spreadsheet via a link that includes an authorisation token. Which means that if you try to view the spreadsheet just using the spreadsheet key, you won’t be allowed to see it; (you also need to be logged in to a Google account to view the data, both as a spreadsheet, and in order to interrogate it via the visualisation API). Which is to say, the Guardian datastore folks are taking what steps they can to make the data public, whilst retaining some control over it (because they have invested resource in collecting the data in the form they’re re-presenting it, and reasonably want to make a return from it…)

But in sharing the link that includes the token on a public website, we can see the key – and hence use it to access the data in the spreadsheet, and do more with it… which may be seen as providing a volume add service over the data, or unreasonably freeloading off the back of the Guardian’s data scraping efforts…

So, just pasting the spreadsheet key and authorisation token into the cut down Guardian datastore explorer script I used in Using CSV Docs As a Database to generate an explorer for the expenses data.

So for example, we can run for example run a report to group expenses by category and MP:

Or how about claims over 5000 pounds (also viewing the information as an HTML table, for example).

Remember, on the datastore explorer page, you can click on column headings to order the data according to that column.

Here’s another example – selecting A,sum(E), where E>0 group by A and order is by sum(E) then asc and viewing as a column chart:

We can also (now!) limit the number of results returned, e.g. to show the 10 MPs with lowest claims to date (the datastore blog post explains that why the data is incomplete and to be treated warily).

Changing the asc order to desc in the above query gives possibly a more interesting result, the MPs who have the largest claims to date (presumably because they have got round to filing their claims!;-)

Okay – enough for now; the reason I’m posting this is in part to ask the question: is the this an unfair use of the Guardian datastore data, does it detract from the work they put in that lets them claim “You cannot get this anywhere else”, and does it impact on the returns they might expect to gain?

Sbould they/could they try to assert some sort of database collection right over the collection/curation and re-presentation of the data that is otherwise publicly available that would (nominally!) prevent me from using this data? Does the publication of the data using the shared link with the authorisation token imply some sort of license with which that data is made available? E.g. by accepting the link by clicking on it, becuase it is a shared link rather than a public link, could the Datastore attach some sort of tacit click-wrap license conditions over the data that I accept when I accept the shared data by clicking through the shared link? (Does the/can the sharing come with conditions attached?)

PS It seems there was a minor “issue” with the settings of the spreadsheet, a result of recent changes to the Google sharing setup. Spreadsheets should now be fully viewable… But as I mention in a comment below, I think there are still interesting questions to be considered around the extent to which publishers of “public” data can get a return on that data?