Jeni's Musings

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.

Update: If you’re interested in expressing statistics in RDF, I’d encourage you to join the publishing statistical data group and take a look at the documentation for ‘SDMX-RDF’ described there.

One of the things that we’ve been discussing over on the UK Government Data Developers mailing list is how best to represent the vast quantities of statistical data that the government produces, in RDF. This is what we’ve come up with.

This week, the Cabinet Office went live with a preview version of hmg.gov.uk/data, available only to those who subscribe to the UK Government Data Developers Google Group. Harry Metcalfe has written a great review, or of course you can check it out yourselves.

Already, though, there are discussions starting on the mailing list about how the data is being made available, and I’m worried that these might distract us from getting things done.

I’m sure that you’ve noticed that my recent posts have been somewhat obsessed with publishing and using public sector information. It’s because I’ve somehow been sucked into the work going on within the UK government, with Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt advising, to publish its data as linked data.

My recent blog posts about publishing data using Talis have actually been a front for much more complex work that I’ve been doing with a different data set.