RSSeNEWS to be determined...

The UK government has taken another step towards implementing greater transparency with the publication of financial data from its Combined Online Information System (COINS).

Freedom-of-information campaigners welcomed the release of an estimated 24m records that detail public expenditure for the 2009-10 financial year. In April 2010 the Labour government refused requests for access to the data.

On his blog the BBC's Martin Rosenbaum appealed to readers to explore the data and report on anything they considered interesting, or good ways to analyse it.

That sentiment was echoed by the chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, who said he hoped that "people will take the opportunity to scrutinise carefully how their money is being spent". But Alexander acknowledged that the data, published on the data.gov.uk website in a raw format, would be difficult to understand and take time to analyse.

The government gave the Open Knowledge Foundation pre-release access to the data, enabling it to produce a more user-friendly rendition on its Where Does My Money Go? website. The Foundation aims to promote transparency and citizen engagement through the analysis and visualisation of information about UK public spending.

As well as posting tabular information, Where Does My Money Go? includes an easy to use interactive dashboard (see screenshot above) that enables users to display data by category of expenditure, and at UK-wide, national and regional levels.

The Guardian's Datablog has produced a Coins explorer. Datablog editor Simon Rogers, recipient of a special commendation in the RSS's 2010 awards for statistical excellence in journalism, encouraged readers to "search the data and help us analyse it".

While acknowledging the change in government policy, Martin Rosenbaum said a freedom-of-information response he'd received made clear the limits in the coalition's open-data policy. The Treasury told Rosenbaum that it would publish annual data going back to 2005-6 shortly, but that data for the present year (2010-11) will not be issued until June 2011.

It reasoned that the current data "relates to the formulation of government policy, and some of it - for example, that relating to government trading funds - is also commercially sensitive". The Treasury claims the data is covered by public interest exemption under the Freedom of Information Act. But according to Rosenbaum the Treasury's stance on current data is contrary to an undertaking to publish "all this information" given by George Osborne while in opposition in 2009.