Shane O’Neill appointed Chairman of ELGIN

Published : 07 November 2011

Shane O’Neill has become the Chairman of ELGIN, the local roadworks portal (www.elgin.gov.uk), recently sold by Jacobs to its management.

Shane O’Neill, who is a member of the Government’s Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information (www.appsi.gov.uk) commented:

“I first saw the potential of ELGIN, not from a Streetworks software point of view, but from a publishing and Transparency perspective.  ELGIN sits neutrally among the streetworks management software providers and reliably polls out accurate information every 30 minutes from a host of different and complex software platforms.

The Prime Minister announced on 7^th July 2011 that all local streetworks data should be made openly available by 2012 and in re-usable format.  ELGIN’s Local Authority community already fully complies with this objective. Local roadworks information sits buried in different back office systems or unaggregated in a host of different formats – and the potential benefits of reusing this localized data in traffic management and sat-nav systems is at present almost entirely unexploited. 

ELGIN exists to change that – its data is free to view and its API is free for developers.  It is a real example of quality public sector information (abstracted reliably and in a timely fashion) being the basis of robust applications and services.  ELGIN is Open Data in practice!  I am delighted to join the dedicated team at www.elgin.org.uk and help steer them to the next stage of ELGIN’s development.”

For further information: info@elgin.org.uk or info@shaneoneill.co.uk