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Many start with a large spreadsheet, or database, that they have never published to anyone before and are unsurprisingly a little concerned when confronted with feverous cries to publish everything as Linked Open Data – Now!
Relax – make yourself a mug of your favourite hot beverage and approach this rationally.
Friday night – nothing on the TV – I know! I’ll browse through the Protection of Freedoms Bill, currently passing through the UK Parliament. Sad I know, but interesting. Lets scroll back in time a bit to November 19th 2010 and a government press conference introduced by a video from Prime Minister David Cameron. The headline story was about the publishing of government spending and contract data, but towards the end of this 109 second short he said the following: … the most exciting is a new right to data. Which will let people request streams of government information and …
As often is the way, events have conspired to prevent me from producing this third and final part in this How & Why of Local Government Spending Data as soon as I wanted. So my apologies to those eagerly awaiting this latest. To quickly recap, in Part 1 I addressed issues around why pick on spending data as a start point for Linked Data in Local Government, and indeed why go for Linked Data at all. In Part 2, I used some of the excellent work that Stuart Harrison at Lichfield District Council has done in this area, as examples …
I started the previous post in this mini-series with an assumption – ..working on the assumption that publishing this [local government spending] data is a good thing. That post attracted several comments, fortunately none challenging the assumption. So learning from that experience I am going to start with another assumption in this post. Publishing Local Authority data, such as local spending data, as ‘Linked Data’ is also a good thing. Those new to this mini-series, check back to the previous post for my reasoning behind the assertion. In this post I am going to be concentrating more on the How …
National Government instructing the 300+ UK Local Authorities to publish “New items of local government spending over £500 to be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011” has had the proponents of both open, and closed, data excited over the last few months. For this mini series of posts I am working on the assumption that publishing this data is a good thing, because I want to move on and assert that [when publishing] one format/method to make this data available should be Linked Data. This immediately brings me to the Why Bother? bit. This itself breaks in to …
