Will the Open Data Institute create a new UK industrial sector?

It is not often that public sector ICT is branded a crucible of innovation. But that is how World Wide Web inventor Time Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt, the UK’s front men for Open Data, describe the release of millions of Terabytes of state info into the public domain.

 

To make that vision a reality, the government has invested real money to try and make it happen. The two ‘grand old men’ of technology and information management are also set to open up a new Open Data Institute (ODI) when it opens its doors on Silicon Roundabout the trendy high tech area in Shoreditch, East London, later this year, for example. The ODI, which is to be bankrolled by the Government to the tune of £10m over the next five years, will act as a research centre and forcing house for the small businesses that are expected to spring up to exploit open data.

 

The Technology Strategy Board, the UK’s official 'innovation agency,' has a lot to do, preparing a plan for the ODI by April. The TSB not only has to find companies prepared to divvy up a further £10m to match the government funding, but draw-up a work programme covering a bewildering array of activities.

 

“We’ve got our work cut out,” agrees David Bott, Director of Innovation Platforms at the Technology Strategy Board, who is currently heading the project. “We are looking at premises and plan to have a business plan together by late February. We’ve been pushing at this door for some time and were a little bit surprised that it swung open so quickly.”

 

At the sharp end, the ODI is to be responsible for business innovation and commercialisation of the state's big Open Data treasure trove. Experts at the ODI will provide “extensive and focussed” support to the small businesses that show the greatest promise for the exploitation of open data, with recipients of ODI support selected through an annual open competition.

 

“The smoother we make the process of producing data and the more powerful tools we give citizens and industry to get value from it, the more we can capitalise on Britain’s leading role in this field. There are billions of pounds to be released from public sector information and thousands of jobs to be created,” say Shadbolt and Berners-Lee.

 

Big names such as Reuters, the business data company, and Experian, the credit rating agency, have been touted in connection with the ODI. But the institute is also expected to help a wide range of start-up and early-stage companies, micro businesses and SMEs to exploit open data through the provision of specialist, technical and commercial services.

 

“We want to make it a natural place to walk in,” says Bott. “A gateway to expertise in places such as the University of Southampton, Oxford University and elsewhere. We start from the premise that data has no value unless it answers a question. We must develop a protocol that finds what questions people want to ask and brings them together with the data.”

 

Luminaries like Berners-Lee and Shadbolt will also promote the use of better Web data standards and technology and help small companies with the skills to win business and deliver innovative solutions into the public sector. In addition, the ODI must act as a UK national training centre to increase the number of trained personnel with open data skills, and provide expert advice for Government.

 

One issue that the ODI will have to come to grips with is making sure open data is clean enough to be useful and that may involve a certain amount of hands on laundry. Most data has been stored without much thought about its future use. “It is often in the wrong format, contains errors and simple confusions that make it difficult to use, and these can, in turn, spawn errors of interpretation that undermine the value,” Bott points out.

 

“Many of these errors are not easily dealt with using machines. They are often caused by the people inputting the data – wrong addresses, swapped letters or numbers, misspellings and so on – and are most effectively corrected by people too.”

 

Bott maintains that ground-up initiatives are becoming increasingly important in sorting out these problems. One example is the use of hack days: events that enable a group of developers to work on a particular problem, based on specific data.