Following on from our podcast conversation with Richard Stirling, Head of Making Public Data Public and data.gov.uk, – based out of the Cabinet Office of the UK Government, in which he explained about the challenges of launching of data.gov.uk, we were asked if it was possible to look behind the scenes at what had been implemented.  Zach Beauvais, and the Talis video camera, were invited in to the Cabinet Office so that Richard could do just that.

Richard walks us through the data.gov.uk site, explaining how data is stored, an accessed.  He explains the [very open] licensing conditions surrounding the data.   It has been well publicised that they have made a commitment to delivering an increasing proportion of that data as Linked Data.  Richard explains the reasoning and benefits of doing that in addition to publishing it in it’s initial raw form.

We get a sneak preview of a new Linked Data API, which will soon provide a simple way to query  data in that form, without the need to understand the SPARQL query language.