The stuff and nonsense of open data in government

When I think of data I think of binary or hexadecimal numbers. This betrays something of my background, but it was a surprise to me when in Defra, the UK Department of State with responsibility for food and the environment, we started to talk about data and I found that other people saw data very differently. Everybody had different preconceptions about data. Some seemed to be very confused. It had become trendy to talk about data, but few people appeared to think about data.