Government pioneers the semantic web
Published : 03 July 2010
Among the many remarkable things about our new Coalition Government is the extent to which it has deepened the previous Government’s commitment to open data policies.
Of course transparency is an easier policy to espouse when you have not been responsible for anything since the last century but this Government’s commitment to a cause to which Gordon Brown had lit his Berners Lee torch is to be applauded.
Last week’s launch of the Your Freedom website has attracted its share of cynicism – not least because of some of the early crackpot contributions. (It may in theory be legal to kill a Welshman from the battlements of Chester Castle but it's surely a legal legacy worth preserving, though not perhaps extending!). But the constant crashes of the website bear testimony to the appeal of the initiative. This e democracy thing has a certain populism.
What we should also recognise too is the innovations agenda. Data.gov.uk stalled during the electoral campaign. Civil servants pedantically considered release of data on the web during the pre-election period as an "act of publishing" (is that seditious? legacy survives!). But since then it has continued to grow – 3611 datasets as of today.
And not just small datasets but thumping great gigabytes of data e.g. the Combined Online Information System (COINS database of UK Government expenditure provided by government departments) as an example, as well as the more publicity attracting list of civil service salaries above 150k.
And whilst the exploitation of geo-spatial data through Ordnance Survey data continues to attract a lot of attention, one must also draw attention to the access given not just to data but to metadata. This truly is the beginnings of the realisation of Berners Lee vision of “linked data” leading to the semantic web - releasing intelligent data which can be manipulated and "linked" to other data.
OS have not just launched OS OpenData but OS OpenSpace where developers can interface with the API (application programming interface) and intelligently programme the data.
Nor is this the only example – the Police API allows you to retrieve information about neighbourhood areas in all 43 police areas of England and Wales. But not only the data - but the metadata relationships which enable further programming and linking. First tremors in the pulse of isemantic web innovation!
Of course, there are obvious teething issues – most effectively articulated by Jeff Gilfelt, the developer of the ASBOrometer , a mobile application that measures levels of anti-social behaviour at your current location (within England and Wales) and gives you access to key local ASB statistics.
Jeff readily acknowledges the weaknesses of Data.gov.uk : “Different datasets are available in many different formats, some easier to work with than others. Some datasets contain very recent data and are refreshed frequently, others are quite stale. Some contain a very granular level of detail, others just provide high level aggregations.”
But he goes on to add :
The Semantic Web initiatives, as well as cultural changes within government with respect to data will hopefully address this, but it is not something that can happen overnight.And here lies the opportunity. I believe data.gov.uk is an untapped goldmine. There is huge potential value in these datasets, but many developers are being put off because they aren't necessarily immediately programatically accessible. Fortunately there are great tools and technology enablers available, many of which are free, that help to solve this.Now is the time to be building unique and interesting applications with this data. My advice is to get in early before the gold-rush begins. The current opportunity for developers in open data represents only the tip of the iceberg.
We couldn’t express the opportunity for the private publishing sector any better. And we should acknowledge at an point of utter angst for the public sector that it is showing leadership and innovation in the information arena.
www.data.gov
However, without a robust and resilient linking framework, many of the potentially significant benefits of the initiatives will be lost.
The key linking dataset for most public data is the address. A year ago, Sir Michael Scholar, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, wrote (8 July 2009) to John Healey, then a Minister of State in the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG):
“Without an Address Register we will never have continuously up-to-date knowledge of the size and distribution of the population …The Statistics Authority believes that despite the pressures on public expenditure, indeed because of them, it is now time for the government to take urgent action to create a single definitive register.”
The principal obstacle to the creation of such a register is the existence of competing intellectual property rights held by: Local Authorities through the Local Government Association (working through the I&Dea and the Local Government Information House with their private sector delivery partners, Intelligent Addressing); Ordnance Survey; Royal Mail; the Office for National Statistics; and Intelligent Addressing Ltd. Lengthy negotiations among the parties in the early years of this century all came to naught.
However, most (arguably all) of the contested intellectual property rights are ultimately owned by public sector bodies or bodies owned by the public sector, so it should be possible, given the political will that exists today, to pool them, even if that requires an element of financial compensation. The technical obstacles to the creation and continuous maintenance of a definitive address register are well understood, and once the mechanism is in place and agreed, the cost of maintenance should not be great.
This issue cannot be dealt with by the www.data.gov community without decisive executive action. It need not be expensive.