UK newspaper launches data comparison website

The Guardian announced this week that it would launch "a major data comparison site" in the wake of the UK government's creation of its own online data store.

The Guardian site will index that and similar government-run websites around the world, creating a large-scale portal to official data.

"It's great news that governments around the globe have opened up their data vaults to the public", said Guardian.co.uk editor Janine Gibson. "What we've done with the World Government Data Search is to provide a simple, user-friendly gateway to all of those statistics and numbers, so users can search for statistics on crime, health, education, agriculture, defence, the economy and many other topics".

IT Pro Portal, however, reports that there are still several flaws in the Guardian's ambitious new site. Data are only available from the governments of the U.S., UK, Australia, and New Zealand, and the site's interface is said to be difficult to work. Additionally, the tech news website said, the WGDS frequently just links to existing government data stores instead of indexing the information itself.