UK: OPSI contribution acknowledged
The UK data.gov.uk blog has published a podcast of Professor Nigel Shadbolt talk to the Transparency leads from UK government Departments. The podcast runs for approximately 44 minutes. Three minutes into the talk Professor Shadbolt discusses how the data.gov.uk project started in the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) back in the mid 2000’s and goes onto briefly discuss a meeting he had with John Sheridan of the OPSI on the subject of “how could technology help with public sector information use and re-use”. Reference is made during the talk to the AKT Research project and reports placed before the UK Parliament in July 2007.
The announcement states:
“Professor Nigel Shadbolt came to The National Archives in December 2010 to meet and talk with the Transparency leads from all government departments, in charge of opening Public Data. He talked about the impacts of opening up data and how this administration was leading the way for other countries on how to generate economical growth and support social initiatives through better Transparency. The following is a podcast of this session which discusses the developments of data.gov.uk and the international, national and local open data movement.”
--
The Office of Public Sector Information annual reports on implementing the re-use of public sector information regulations within the UK provide a historic overview of the actions undertaken. OPSI has published three reports to date.
--
The United Kingdom Implementation of the European Directive on the e-use of Public Sector Information - the first two years
On page 18 and 19 states:
AKTive PSI: Leading by Example
4.20 The UK public sector is a source of rich, high quality and sought after data. While much of this information is published and available for re-use by others, it is often trapped by poor data structures, locked up in legacy data formats or in fragmented databases.
4.21 To explore the issues more fully, in 2005-6, OPSI worked with Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT), an inter-disciplinary research project led by the University of Southampton. OPSI’s work with AKT, in a research project called AKTive PSI, had two aims:
- to raise awareness about and disseminate the capabilities of semantic web technologies amongst government departments, agencies and local authorities;
- to show what is possible using this technology.
4.22 OPSI brought together a diverse collection of public sector information assets to experiment with. A number of public sector organisations were involved in the project, including Ordnance Survey, the Met Office, the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Office for National Statistics, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Environment Agency and the London Boroughs of Camden and Lewisham. The project underlined the potential for the use of semantic web technology in large scale integration of public sector information and the benefits such aggregation would bring. Semantic Web technology provides the best model for a range of interoperability issues. If widely adopted it would do much to harness the re-use of public sector information.
4.23 AKTive PSI has spawned further work in government using Semantic Web technology, OPSI is using this technology in the following ways:
- Publishing content semantically from the London Gazette (the UK Official Journal) using Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology language (OWL) as part of a full scale re-use strategy for the Gazettes;
- Developing a scheme for URI references to government copyright statements, conditions and licences supported by Click-Use web services;
- Releasing a highly granular URI scheme for the official version of legislation online, with longer term plans to add some level of semantic information to this content.
4.24 Other participants in AKTive PSI, such as Ordnance Survey, have also made use of Semantic Web technology. For example, the OS GeoSemantics team has released an ontology and dataset of 11,000 instances for Administrative Geography, which describes the administrative divisions in the UK – a complex dataset ideally suited to semantic representation.
4.25 OPSI continues to work with the University of Southampton and the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), a collaboration between Southampton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is bringing together academics, scientists and decision makers from around the world, to examine the World Wide Web and is offering approaches to help guide its future. OPSI made a significant contribution to the joint WSRI/W3C workshop on e-Government and the Web in June 2007, delivering a keynote address. The outcomes from AKTive PSI were also featured at the workshop as a case study of data integration with government information.
4.26 The collective aim from these activities is to develop awareness of Semantic Web technology within government and its key role in furthering the re-use agenda. To do this OPSI is sponsoring further research into the potential of Semantic Web technology for enabling re-use and more flexibly aggregating public sector information on a large scale. Plans for a publicly available research space using public sector information are well advanced.
--
The United Kingdom Report on the Re-use of Public Sector Information 2008 UNLOCKING PSI POTENTIAL
On page 62 states:
9 Information Assets
The benefits of asset lists and registers continue in discussions with other government departments reviewing new solutions offered by Web 2.0 technology.
--
The United Kingdom Report on the Re-use of Public Sector Information 2009: unlocking psi potential
On page 48 states:
Harnessing technology across the wider information landscape
6.27 The National Archives is working with other governments and organizations worldwide, to share experience and to learn from others. The work of the Obama Administration with the creation of data.gov and recovery.gov. has directed attention to the re-use of government information. The e-Government Interest Group of the W3C provides an important forum for those interested in open government data to discuss best practice approaches. The fact that the W3C has prioritised this area of work emphasises how both the private and public sector have realised the potential benefits and innovation of PSI re-use. The National Archives has taken a leading role contributing to W3C documents such as Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web and the Data.gov* Memo, designed to help the public sector to publish data on the web.
6.28 The National Archives is also engaged with the University of Southampton on a project entitled OpenPSI, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). Due to be completed in the autumn of 2009, the project aims to support the re-use of PSI by the academic and research community.
OPSI Reviews UK PSI Implementation
OPSI to lead on Government response!
- 341 reads
