The accessible face of Open Data

If anyone is the public 'face' of UK Open Data, Professor Nigel Shadbolt of Southampton University fits the bill. The artificial intelligence expert and former president of the British Computer Society is at the forefront of efforts to open up public sector data, it seems.

 

His interest is not just in publishing large amounts of information but also in how best to exploit it. As head of the university’s electronics and computer science department he has been researching what is known as the 'Semantic Web'.

 

Up until now the 'Net has mostly been about interactions involving humans, gies this theory. But the increasing amount of information, particularly numerical data, available on the web calls for new ways of making it easier for machines to locate and process it.

 

The Semantic Web, a term coined by original WWW inventor Tim Berners-Lee, aims to structure and describe data so that machines can make sense of it, carrying out searches and coming up with answers that previously could only be arrived at by people. The ability to analyse data automatically will be a big help in capitalising on open data.

 

Data.gov 

On the strength of his work, the Labour government co-opted Professor Shadbolt, along with Berners-Lee, as an information advisor. Within a year his appointment in 2009, he had masterminded the launch of data.gov, a website that now makes over 5,000 datasets of non-personal information available to the public.

 

All data included in data.gov.uk is owned or licenced to the crown and in turn all the data available via the site is available free under non-exclusive licensing arrangements. Users are able to exploit the data as they wish, provided they acknowledge where it came from.

 

Technical experts are now working on tools for querying, filtering and searching across all the government datasets and application programming interfaces to speed the release of data to developers.

 

Professor Shadbolt has also joined the Public Sector Transparency Board, set up by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude to draw up open data standards across the public sector and to develop legislation that would ensure the public’s right to government data.

 

“When the data has been released the applications have quickly followed, from mobile apps to find an NHS dentist to companies that use the open data to advise local authorities on how to get the best value for money,” he says. “These open data apps are creating new businesses for their developers and great resources for us all.”

 

Many of the developments are based on mash-ups: Web applications that combine data or code from two or more sources and are designed to provide information or functionality beyond that envisaged by the original producers of the data.

 

They can be put together very quickly. For example, last year groups of UK students used government data to hack together consumer applications in healthcare, education and the environment as part of a month-long exercise to put Silicon Valley investors together with UK high tech companies.

 

Southampton’s own winning idea was called The Emergency App, a mobile service that allows users to notify multiple contacts simultaneously in the event of an emergency.

 

To be usable for analysis and reporting, open data has not only got to be published in accessible formats but also to be searchable and capable of being recombined in new ways. Developers have been investigating the use of linked data to aid this process.

 

“We’ve been championing linked data for some time, because it will revolutionise reporting and analysis,” says Anwen Robinson, managing director of business software company Unit4. “We have produced a utility that extracts data, redacts (edits) it and publishes it in a linked data format.”

 

Robinson sees a progression by public sector organisations from closed data formats, to open formats including Excel, to linked data formats such as the Resource Description Format, a World Wide Web Consortium specification which describes data and is already used by Facebook.

 

“Using RDF, data made available through the open data initiative could be combined with data on the internet to create data-as-a-service products,” she explains.

 

However, Open Data doesn’t mean open season on an individual’s right to privacy. Indeed, Shadbolt has co-authored a book called The Spy in the Coffee Machine about the need to preserve confidentiality.

 

He was also a co-founder of Garlik, a company recently sold to Experian that aims to protect individuals from online fraud and identity theft. Garlick’s service DataPatrol continuously monitors the web to detect the theft, loss or disclosure of a user’s information.

 

“The smoother we make the process of producing data, and the more powerful the tools we give citizens and industry to get value from it, the more we can capitalise on Britain’s leading role in this field,” Shadbolt sums up.

 

“There are billions of pounds to be released from public sector information and thousands of jobs to be created.”

 

Sounds good - especially in these trying times.