A New Beginning

It is great to launch a new venture, and I am looking forward to launching this one – Data Liberate. Having said that, there is much continuity in this step. Those that know me from the conference circuit, my work with the Talis Group and more recently with Talis Consulting, will recognise much in the core of what Data Liberate has to offer.

Linked Spending Data – How and Why Bother Pt3

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

Linked Spending Data – How and Why Bother Pt2

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

Linked Spending Data – How and Why Bother Pt1

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