UKGovLD

On the 28th June the Government made a commitment in the Open Data White Paper to establish a new cross-government linked data working group.

The outline was for the UK Government Linked Data Working Group 'to lead the creation and maintenance of the underpinning technologies within the public sector and promote the benefits across the public sector. A key role for the group will be to work with data owners, data users and bodies such as the W3C Government Linked Data Working Group, to promote and set standards for the adoption of common URIs across government. This provision of a core of authoritative identifiers (for instance for businesses, contracts, postcodes and geo-spatial entities such as roads and bus stops) will be the key to connecting data across the information economy and allowing businesses to add value and to exchange information reliably in the digital world.'

To establish the group a Quick Start Team was formed the first step being to draft terms of reference. This was ratified by vote at the first working group event.

UK Government Linked Data Working Group

The terms of reference for the UK Government Linked Data Working Group (UKGovLD) are available in a number of formats.

pdf - UKGovLD Terms of Reference http://data.gov.uk/sites/default/files/UKGovLDDraftTermsofReference.pdf
odt - UKGovLD Terms of Reference http://data.gov.uk/sites/default/files/UKGovLDDraftTermsofReference.odt
doc - UKGovLD Terms of Reference http://data.gov.uk/sites/default/files/UKGovLDDraftTermsofReference.doc

Membership

The working group is comprised of a Delivery Team (actively driving the agenda) and a wider open membership forum. This wider membership is being focused through the UKGovLD virtual forum https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/ukgovld.

The Delivery Group

Alex Coley - Alex.Coley@defra.gsi.gov.uk
Bill Roberts - bill@swirrl.com
Dave Reynolds - dave@epimorphics.com
David Buck - david.buck@defra.gsi.gov.uk
David Read - david.read@hackneyworkshop.com
Hadley Beeman - hadley.beeman@tsb.gov.uk
Jeni Tennison - jeni@theodi.org
Jeremy Tandy - jeremy.tandy@metoffice.gov.uk
John Goodwin - john.goodwin@ordnancesurvey.co.uk
John Sheridan - John.Sheridan@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk
Leigh Dodds - leigh@ldodds.com
Paul Davidson - Paul.Davidson@Sedgemoor.gov.uk
Peter Winstanley - Peter.Winstanley@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
Richard Goodwin - richard.goodwin@tso.co.uk
Steve Peters - Steve.Peters@communities.gsi.gov.uk

UKGovLD - opening the doors event summary http://data.gov.uk/linked-data/UKGovLD/otd5nov

Welcome, introduction were provided by Alex Coley who was voted in a Chair of UKGovLD at the end of the event. Alex Guest Blog for the Open Data Institute summarised the event and the opportunities for Open and Linked Data.

Ongoing Activities:

URIs

We are currently reviewing and looking to update the current "Designing URI sets for the UK public sector and for Location" Guidance based on the experience of implementations over the last few years.

The current guidance can be found here.

Recommendations and summary of survey responses from phase one of the review.

Registry

A number of groups, including the UK Location program, have found a need for an authoritative register of resources to help coordinate their information publishing. Examples of such resources include codes, codes lists, vocabularies and reference data.

The UKGovLD registry activity is developing a solution to this in which the resources are identifiable by URIs and are accessible as linked data. The group has developed an initial specification for such a Linked Data Registry service, which is openly available at: https://github.com/der/ukl-registry-poc/wiki

We're developing the content

We're developing the content for this page, as we set up UKGovLD but in the mean time if there is something that you would like us to cover please provide a comment or let us know via @UKGovLD.