www.governmenttechnology.co.uk
Government Technology | Volume 9.5
OPEN DATA
THE DRIVE TOWARDS TRANSPARENCY As we embark upon the new world of transparency and open data, Terry Blake, technical services director at TSO, explores the challenges and benefits of opening up data TRANSPARENCY? OPEN DATA? Linked Data? If you have been following government policy for the last 12 months or so you’ll have a reasonably strong idea of what I’m talking about. Originally driven by the Labour government and now embraced by the incumbent Tory-Lib Dem coalition, the push for government transparency in the form of open data could not be greater. Giving the British public a true picture of what information is being created, collated and stored amongst the walls of both central and local government promises to provide genuine transparency to the services funded by tax payers. The race to open up data is now on and taking place at an impressive rate. The questions remain though; how achievable is this initiative, what are the issues and benefits we all face in trying to meet the utopian view and how do we go about it? FROM THE BEGINNING Firstly, where did it all start? In early December 2009, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, announced plans to open up UK government data which included: public services performance data, new transport data and geospatial data. Who better to head up this new initiative than Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, hired back in June 2009, producing a beta version of what is now known as the data. gov.uk website. This project was underway by September 2009 and since then has developed at quite a pace, launching as a single and easy to use online access point in January 2010, and recently growing to present over 3,500 data sets from all over government. Now, under the new Prime Minister David Cameron, the drive has increased further. The Conservative ‘Building the Big Society’ paper was a clear message of continued support for opening up data, encouraging citizens, communities and local government to utilise this information so that they could become more empowered and help to build the Britain that they want. After only a few weeks in office, Cameron set out his commitment to open up government data in a letter to government departments and with some clear deadlines too. The new Public Sector Transparency Board, chaired by Francis Maude, appointed both Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt as board members along with Tom Steinberg, the founder of mysociety. This will help build on achievements already made by data.gov.uk, ensuring that these leading experts
46
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE FOR GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY
continue the drive to open up data and set open data standards across the public sector. At the time of writing, the Transparency Board had just set out its draft principles including that public data will be published in reusable, machine-readable form, using open standards and following relevant recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium. AN UNTAPPED RESOURCE The developments over the past few months are really no surprise to those of us who work across central government departments, government agencies and local authorities and those who have been in ICT for the last decade or so. We’ve been aware of the semantic web from Tim Berners-Lee’s speeches back in 1999 and could more recently see the reasoning behind the need for linked data. “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analysing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘semantic web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ that people have touted for ages will finally materialise.” To create intelligent agents though, we needed data that could act intelligently and with that, slowly but surely, linked open data was born. More recently in January 2010, Tim BernersLee told BBC News: “It’s such an untapped resource…government data is something we have already spent the money on... and when it is sitting there on a disk in somebody’s office it is wasted.” If we as individuals, communities, societies and nations are to progress, surely the obvious thing would be to take what was once static information residing either online or in files and utilise the World Wide Web as Tim Berners-Lee intended. So now, over 20 years after its introduction we seem to have evolved our thinking and the ability to really harness the web in a way that can truly benefit us all. But how do we achieve this? There have been two phases to this initiative so far. The initial push was to put up the data that already existed in whatever format was readily available, but that’s really not enough. In order for that data to be reusable it needs to be unlocked from the usual PDF, Excel and HTML formats and converted into linked, machine readable formats. The second step, the one we’re in now, requires organisations
to adopt a series of standards when publishing their data using recommended linked data formats such as RDF. If we’re to build true transparency then data needs to be structured in a way that enables it to be correctly open and interoperable. New data can be captured in ways which makes it easy to transform it into linked data but for existing data your only option may be to retrofit it using advanced techniques to automatically structure and enrich content. Thankfully many organisations, including ours, realise the importance of setting out best practice to provide a sustainable environment to publish data. TSO is working with organisations including the Cabinet Office, the COI and The National Archives to bring this together, establishing the principles for publishing government linked data and helping different people, organisations and departments see exactly what they need to do to deliver upon the open data drive. For instance, reference data sets for common data such as government departments and MPs all need to be created and shared so that all can refer to data in the same way. I can’t emphasis enough how important it is for people to work to a standard