Dan Hubert was driving into London’s West End to see a show. He circled the roads around the theatre trying to find a parking space. The only one available was on a single yellow line. He looked for a sign showing whether the bay was residents’ parking only, and if not, what the time restrictions were. Finding nothing, he assumed he’d have to move on. Fortunately, he spotted a traffic warden who said he was, in fact, able to park there.

It was then Hubert realised London must be full of parking spaces thatare underused because people are confused about the rules for each street and are cautious about getting a ticket. Their confusion is understandable. There are 1,800 individually controlled parking zones across the capital, each governed under different rules by the 32 boroughs.

Hubert’s revelation led to him creating AppyParking, an app that gives users all the information they need about available parking spaces anywhere in the capital. To build it, he contacted each borough to ask for data on their street parking restrictions. After considerable negotiation, he sourced the information he needed. But it was here the problems started.

First, he discovered that every borough records their information in different styles, including hard-to-use formats such as images of maps in PDF documents.

Undeterred, Hubert invested his own time and money in building The Parking Platform - a tool that could handle all the different data styles to feed into the app. To date, he and investors have put £250,000 into the project.

Second, while some councils have improved the quality of their data in the two years since Hubert started his venture, others – including Kensington and Chelsea, Barnet, Havering, Lambeth and Barking and Dagenham – have said they will no longer share their data, in some cases because they may wish to develop their own parking apps.

As Hubert seeks to raise a further £1m to extend AppyParking across the rest of the UK, he wonders whether councils’ reluctance to share records could derail his plan.

A flawed approach to open data Alongside increasing transparency and improving public services, one of the government’s core stated objectives for open data has been to boost innovation by data-driven businesses. Hubert's experience points to three flaws in the approach of some local authorities that place the objective at risk. 1. No guaranteed supply of data Few entrepreneurs or investors will be willing to risk their own time and capital to build products if the data they rely on cannot be guaranteed. Yet it’s entirely understandable why no such guarantees are made. The UK’s “get it out and see what people do with it” approach to open data is financially unsustainable. Releasing open data is not cost-free. It can require investment in new or updated software, potentially the creation and maintenance of a web portal or the development of application programming interfaces (APIs). Most importantly, it requires the resource time to annotate the data and to provide sufficient support for those who wish to use it. The fact HM Treasury may eventually receive extra tax revenues from data-fuelled businesses does not help the budgets of the organisations which provide the data in the first place. With the current pressure on public sector finances, it is plausible that some councils may cease providing open data altogether if they see it as nothing more than a cost centre. 2. Too small-scale to be viable Though a small number of local authorities make use of combined open data portals, such as Data.gov.uk or the London Data Store, many more release open data separately and in non-comparable formats. This makes it incredibly hard for potential developers to create a viable business model from an open data product. The typical price of an app is around 69p and revenues from advertising are just a few pence per click, so developers need a larger potential customer base than the residents of just one local authority. The case of AppyParking – where some local authorities wanted to create their own parking apps – shows how councils ignore that citizens do not conveniently live out their lives in a single local authority area. Who wants to have 32 parking apps just to be able to drive around London? 3. Poor data quality While some – like Hubert – can work with poor quality data, it raises barriers to developers making use of data. Without further standardisation, there will be an artificial limit on the number of businesses that have the time and resources to build useful products. Computer Weekly buyer’s guide to public open data In this 11-page buyer’s guide, Computer Weekly looks at how government publishes open data and the applications developers find for it – such as those to mitigate the worst damage of the floods in early 2014. Click here to download the buyer's guide to public open data.