Petition Ensure publicly available structured data is available in standard computer formats such as CSV, JSON, JSONP, XML

Note: This requirement should be applied to all government and all nationally funded institutions, including such as Ofcom (TV transmitters lists, radiation patterns, etc), PSB-funded such as BBC & C4 (TV Schedules, web player lists).

The IT of said institutions is funded by taxes, licence fees, etc, which residents pay, and therefore it and its output belongs to us. It is unacceptable and undemocratic that too often the fees of implementing IT are wasted on commercial software, when open source solutions exist, and equally that public structured data arising from IT should so often either not be available in a structured form at all, or else only in an inappropriate or barely usable form, such as using PDFs for lists, instead of making available the underlying data.

Government should legislate to ensure that wherever reasonably possible throughout said institutions open source software and open data standards are employed.