Interested in open data, particularly public-sector open data? Indulge yourself then in a Desert Island Discs moment. Specifically, that moment at the end of the programme where the interviewee, having picked their seven "must have" songs, is asked which of all of them he or she would keep before all others - the one that they truly

The equivalent version for you is: which set of open data would you like to get from the UK government so as to have the maximum impact on the open data movement?

That's what leads us back to the question at the top. If the people inside the civil service presently labouring with the question of quite why the crime data should be available were able to see its release having a positive effect, or if they could see it being welcomed by the public, perhaps they'd find the cultural change easier to bear. Of course the politicians could help too; I've not heard any anecdotes of ministers coming into their office in the morning and saying to their aides "Fantastic stuff getting that data released! Brilliant work!" Perhaps I haven't been listening hard enough.

. transport data, including train timetables, prices, and live departure and arrival times. We pay billions of pounds to the rail network and operators - the least we deserve is open data about how to use them to the best effect;

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: the big problem with the crime maps from the police is that they are so heroically vague. That's because the Information Commissioner argues that the location of a crime can be "personally identifying information" (PII) which shouldn't be made public. So crimes are "mapped" to vast spaces, rather than the location where they happened. This is understandable for cases of domestic abuse, say, but it's hard to see why something like sexual assaults that happened in a park shouldn't be closely located to the park. That would have predictive value: people would know not to go near that area of the park (and perhaps at that time). Those "location-specific" bits of information are what made chicagocrime.org (which directly mapped crime locations, using the police blotter, in Chicago) back in 2005. That's and it was

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too, is retrospective, but it could be very useful for people who want to know about the health of a business, or the track record of the directors of a company. Again and again it's important to know just what sort of company you're doing business with, and it's surprising that Companies House still charges for something which could be very useful if made free. (There are companies which are paying at one end and making the data free at the other, such as Duedil, although the criticism from some is that it doesn't output open data. (This seems like an excessive criticism; the stream has to stop somewhere.) But it's also a niche, if a potentially extremely profitable one.

So to sum up: it looks to me like transport data is the dataset that will have real resonance with people, and which offers the best chance of a win for the open data movement. We all need to travel, even if it's only trivial distances; we want to know costs, we want to know journey times, we want to know where we are. If we could get the train timetables, fares, and bus routes and fares, made available as open data I think that there would be plenty of enterprising developers who would be able to create apps that would let you take advantage of them.