Jeni's Musings

Kyle Neath’s post on URL design (go read it) reflects a lot of the thinking that we went through in the design of the legislation.gov.uk URIs and the linked data API as used within data.gov.uk.

I found the section about HTML5’s History interface particularly interesting. We haven’t started using AJAX within legislation.gov.uk yet, but when we do, we will want to ensure that the different views these pages provide have distinct URIs, so that they remain bookmarkable and sharable. This is progressive enhancement applied to web applications at a deeper level than CSS and Javascript.

There are a couple of additional things that I think are worth drawing out.

I’m aware I’ve been quiet for the past few months. This isn’t because nothing interesting has been going on — rather the opposite. It’s been difficult to get a chance to sit down and write about the work I’ve been doing, when actually doing the work has been taking up so much time.

Most of my time has been spent on the new legislation.gov.uk website and its underlying API. There’s so much to say about this project that I hardly know where to start, so I’ll just try to do an overview and we can take it from there. Let me know what you’re interested in.

In the Linked Data world, we talk a lot about having URIs that are identifiers for things, and making them HTTP URIs so that they can be dereferenced and people can find more information about those things.

This raises the questions of “what information should you publish?” Let’s make this concrete by using a real example: UK Legislation, which TSO is publishing for OPSI as Linked Data.

The Free Our Bills campaign was launched recently in the UK. Some of the comments I’ve seen about the campaign makes me think that it might be helpful if people understood more about how Bills and legislation get published in the UK. I thought I’d offer a bit of background based on my experience (though there are many people with more intimate knowledge of the processes involved; perhaps they’ll correct me when I get it wrong).