Earlier this year Gordon Brown appointed Tim Berners-Lee as an advisor to the Cabinet Office to help the government begin the process of opening up its data. This was one part of the initiation of a project to begin opening up UK government data in a similar style to the US. A key part of Berners-Lee’s vision for putting government data online has been Linked Data which promises to provide a much richer way for citizens to begin accessing, browsing, and using government data.

Several other governments have begun opening up data assets including Australia and New Zealand. These approaches mirror that of the US data.gov site, providing a browsable directory of datasets and links to raw data downloads in a range of different formats. The preview launch of data.gov.uk which was announced at the end of September also includes a directory of datasets which is powered by the software underlying the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network. But the site also aims to fulfill Berners-Lee’s vision and in addition provide access to some datasets as Linked Data through SPARQL endpoints.

We’re very pleased to report that the Talis Platform is currently underpinning the delivery of all of the Linked Data and SPARQL endpoints for the data.gov.uk site.

We’ve been quietly supporting the effort for several months now helping out with data management, modelling discussions, and with training on the core technology. There seems to be a very definite appetite in government to not only open the raw data but to also explore the potential for Linked Data. Its clear from today’s announcement about opening up additional aspects of the Ordnance Survey data that there’s a real focus on delivering on the open data promise. While there are certainly some high-profile datasets like the Ordnance Survey or postcode data that may require legislative changes to become open, one of the biggest implementation challenges facing government is pulling together an overall directory of datasets and spreadsheets that are already scattered across multiple departmental websites.

Creating a dataset directory provides the required basic level of infrastructure to allow reuse, by enabling developers to find what they need; publishing Linked Data, SPARQL endpoints, and potentially extra APIs provides an additional set of options for ways to access the data. By letting datasets be browsable by anyone, not just developers, Linked Data offers the potential for anyone to find, discover and reuse interesting datasets. As I illustrated in a recent talk, these approaches are not mutually exclusive and the goal should be maximum utility.

Over on the Talis Platform developer blog we’ve begun showing some ways that the initial datasets, covering UK schools and traffic measurements can be queried in interesting ways. Its been exciting to see people begin to pick up the technology and creating reporting tools to explore the data, but also fantastic to be able to easily view data using only a browser.

There’s clearly still a great deal of work ahead, but the ground work has now been completed: there’s infrastructure in place to support data publishing; official guidelines on creating public sector URIs; and some agreement on best practices for modelling statistical data. The next challenge is to start ramping up the conversion of currently open data into RDF, in order to begin expanding the coverage of the Linked Data.

This is a very exciting project and here at Talis it’s something in which we’re very proud to be playing a role.