Sir Nigel Shadbolt knows better than most about the importance of being able to track who has - and who has not - had coronavirus.

As arguably Britain’s foremost computer scientist, Sir Nigel has been advising NHS's innovation unit on what core data is needed to respond more effectively to the pandemic, and how masses of quality information can be used to “just know what’s going on”.

But it is also personal for him. His daughter was among the first few hundred known to have contracted the virus in London. “She didn’t realise it at the time, and neither frankly did we,” the 63-year-old says.

After self-isolating, unable to smell or taste anything, she started back in work as a secondary school teacher last week. But it is difficult to know how safe she is. “I mean, I say she had it, but she was, of course, not tested,” Sir Nigel says.

Like many families, Sir Nigel is unable to see her, but is not too far away, hunkered down in Oxford with his wife and son - away from his home in Lymington, Hampshire but in a city where he holds the post of principal at Jesus College and professor of computer science at the university.

The area he has been focusing over the past few years with the Open Data Institute, which he founded with the so-called father of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is coming into sharp focus: Public data is, it seems, being opened out to the corporates.