Category: Government

Will This Flood of Open Data Wash Past Us?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

 @ePISplatform features fairly prominently in the stream of tweets that waft across my desktop every day – it comes from the European Public Sector Information (PSI) Platform (Europe’s One-stop Shop on PSI re-use) Working to stimulate and promote PSI re-use and open data initiatives. In amongst the useful pointers to news, comment, and documents, I have been recently conscious of an increasing flow of tweets like these: This is good news.  More and more city, local, national governments and public bodies releasing data as open data.  Of course the reference to open here is in relation to the licensing of …

Open Data: Digital Fuel or Raw Material?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

I have been reading with interest ‘Digital Fuel of the 21st Century: Innovation through Open Data and the Network Effect’ by Vivek Kundra. Well worth a read to place the current [Digital] Revolution we are somewhere in the middle of, in relation to preceding revolutions and the ages that they begat.

OK So Who Noticed the SOPA Blackout

Posted on by Richard Wallis

All in all, I believe the campaign has been surprisingly effective on the visible web. However, what prompted this post was trying to ascertain how effective it was on the Data Web, which almost by definition is the invisible web. Ahead of the dark day, a move started on the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data mailing lists to replicate what Wikipedia was doing by going dark on Dbpedia

What Is Your Data’s Star Rating(s)?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

The Linked Data movement was kicked off in mid 2006 when Tim Berners-Lee published his now famous Linked Data Design Issues document. Many had been promoting the approach of using W3C Semantic Web standards to achieve the effect and benefits, but it was his document and the use of the term Linked Data that crystallised it, gave it focus, and a label.

In 2010 Tim updated his document to include the Linked Open Data 5 Star Scheme

Will Government Open Licence Extensions be a haven for the timid?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

National Archives announced today UK government licensing policy extended to make more public sector information available: Building on the success of the Open Government Licence, The National Archives has extended the scope of its licensing policy, encouraging and enabling even easier re-use of a wider range of public sector information. The UK Government Licensing Framework (UKGLF), the policy and legal framework for the re-use of public sector information, now offers a growing portfolio of licences and guidance to meet the diverse needs and requirements of both public sector information providers and re-user communities. On the surface this is move is …

UK Government Commits to More Open Data

Posted on by Richard Wallis

A couple of weeks back UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced the broadening of the publicly available government data with the publishing of key data on the National Health Service, schools, criminal courts and transport. The background to the announcement was a celebration of the preceding year of activity in the areas of transparency and open data, with many core government data sets being published. Too many to list here, but the 7,200+ listed on data.gov.uk gives you an insight.  The political guide to this is undeniable, as Mr Cameron makes clear in his YouTube speech for the announcement “Information …

Are We Getting A Right to Data?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Friday night – nothing on the TV – I know! I’ll browse through the Protection of Freedoms Bill, currently passing through the UK Parliament. Sad I know, but interesting. Lets scroll back in time a bit to November 19th 2010 and a government press conference introduced by a video from Prime Minister David Cameron.  The headline story was about the publishing of government spending and contract data, but towards the end of this 109 second short he said the following: … the most exciting is a new right to data. Which will let people request streams of government information and …

Linked Spending Data – How and Why Bother Pt3

Posted on by Richard Wallis

As often is the way, events have conspired to prevent me from producing this third and final part in this How & Why of Local Government Spending Data as soon as I wanted.  So my apologies to those eagerly awaiting this latest. To quickly recap, in Part 1 I addressed issues around why pick on spending data as a start point for Linked Data in Local Government, and indeed why go for Linked Data at all.  In Part 2, I used some of the excellent work that Stuart Harrison at Lichfield District Council has done in this area, as examples …

Linked Spending Data – How and Why Bother Pt2

Posted on by Richard Wallis

I started the previous post in this mini-series with an assumption – ..working on the assumption that publishing this [local government spending] data is a good thing. That post attracted several comments, fortunately none challenging the assumption.   So learning from that experience I am going to start with another assumption in this post.  Publishing Local Authority data, such as local spending data, as ‘Linked Data’ is also a good thing.  Those new to this mini-series, check back to the previous post for my reasoning behind the assertion. In this post I am going to be concentrating more on the How …

Linked Spending Data – How and Why Bother Pt1

Posted on by Richard Wallis

National Government instructing the 300+ UK Local Authorities to publish “New items of local government spending over £500 to be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011” has had the proponents of both open, and closed, data excited over the last few months.  For this mini series of posts I am working on the assumption that publishing this data is a good thing, because I want to move on and assert that [when publishing] one format/method to make this data available should be Linked Data. This immediately brings me to the Why Bother? bit. This itself breaks in to …