Open data from arts and cultural organisations won’t help you choose a school or a hospital or make a financial decision, but it could create new ways of understanding history, experiencing great art and literature, and - fundamentally - help us to understand more about ourselves.

Ahead of the launch of the Culture Hack Open Data Repository, Rachel Coldicutt and Kim Plowright gave an overview of the arts open-data landscape and discussed the importance of making some of our greatest assets open and machine readable.

Rachel Coldicutt is a director of Caper and founder of Culture Hack. She was previously Head of Digital Media at the Royal Opera House.

Kim Plowright does things on the Internet. Her recent projects include D-Day As It Happened for Channel 4 and Pepys Road for Faber & Faber. She created the Culture Hack Data Repository for Caper with Frankie Roberto.