1. John Sheridan
Linked Data lead for data.gov.uk
Head of Legislation Services at The [UK] National Archives

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5. 16. GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY
The Government believes that we need to throw open the doors of public bodies, to
enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account. We also
recognise that this will help to deliver better value for money in public spending,
and help us achieve our aim of cutting the record deficit. Setting government data
free will bring significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-
profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites.
We will require public bodies to publish online the job titles of every member of
staff and the salaries and expenses of senior officials paid more than the lowest
salary permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale, and
organograms that include all positions in those bodies.
We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open
and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by
third parties.
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7. Formats for people Formats for machines
 Focused on presentation or  Focused on data interchange
typographic layout between computers
 Look good, but hard to access  Look dreadful, hard for people
the underlying data to understand but easy to import
into other systems and use
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8. Formats for Single Formats for
people source of machines
 Focused on  Focused on data
presentation or data interchange between
typographic layout computers
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9.  Download
 Good for static information
 Small files
 Used for export/import
 Easy for publishers
 Most of the data registered on data.gov.uk
 Programmatic access
 Good for dynamic or real-time information or very large datasets
 Lets developers select and use just the information they need
 Retains more control for the publisher
 More complicated to implement but much more powerful
 Vital for many useful datasets
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11. He also developed the first industrially
practical screw-cutting lathe in 1800, allowing
standardisation of screw thread sizes for the
first time. This allowed the concept of
interchangeability (a idea that was already
taking hold) to be practically applied to nuts
and bolts. Before this, all nuts and bolts had to
be made as matching pairs only. This meant
that when machines were disassembled,
careful account had to be kept of the
matching nuts and bolts ready for when
reassembly took place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Maudslay

12. In 1841, Joseph Whitworth created a design
that, through its adoption by many British
railroad companies, became a national
standard for the United Kingdom called
British Standard Whitworth. During the
1840s through 1860s, this standard was
often used in the United States and Canada
as well, in addition to myriad intra- and
inter-company standards. .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_thread#
History_of_standardization

13. * make your stuff available on the Web
(whatever format) under an open licence
** make it available as structured data (e.g.,
Excel instead of image scan of a table)
*** use non-proprietary formats (e.g., CSV
instead of Excel)
**** use URIs to identify things, so that people
can point at your stuff
***** link your data to other data to provide
context
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15.  Give names, or web identifiers (URIs), to
things
 Publish information about them as Web
Resources
 Use RDF triples (subject, property, value)
 Link to other data about those things
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16.  Enables web-scale data publishing - distributed
publication with web-based discovery mechanisms
 Everything is a resource – follow your nose to
discover more about properties, classes, or codes
within a code list
 Everything can be annotated - make comments
about observations, data series, points on a map
 Easy to extend - create new properties as required,
no need to plan everything up-front
 Easy to merge - slot together RDF graphs, no need
to worry about name clashes
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18.  developing standards for responsible
publishing of key types of data (financial
data, organisation data, aggregate statistics,
location data)
 developing guidance, practices and tools
that make it easy to publish data in Linked
Data form, at low cost
 making it easy for people to consume data
in a programmatic way

19. Director General
2008 2009 2010
A 1,345 1,456 2,301
Director Director B 2,112 3,543 2,111
(Operations) (Strategy)
C 2,345 2,987 2,455
D 6,342 6,256 6,123
Deputy Director Deputy Director E 7,435 7,432 8,102
(A) (A)
Transaction Date Supplier Amount
A-1263 09/09/2010 Spottiswoode & Co £ 2,345
A-1264 09/09/2010 JSB & Sons £ 2,111
A-1265 09/09/2010 BLG Ltd £ 2,455
A-1266 09/09/2010 Spottiswoode & Co £ 6,123
A-1267 09/09/2010 BLG Ltd £ 8,102

20.  URI = uniform resource identifier
 Everything starts HTTP – which gives us
actionable names
 There is choice about how to make URIs
 We are using
{sector}.data.gov.uk/id/{something}
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23.  If you visit legislation.gov.uk you will see we
have taken great care with naming things
Returns an html document for United Kingdom Public General Act (ukpga), 2005,
Chapter 14, Section 1
Returns an html document with a list from all legislation types where the title
contains “wildlife”
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24.  UK Public General Act (ukpga)
 1981
 Chapter 69
 Section 5
 As it extends to England
 As it stood on 30th January 2001
 Displayed as an HTML document with the timeline
on
 Although URIs are opaque having this type of
design changes how people use the service
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26.  Everything on legislation.gov.uk is available
as open data under the terms of our Open
Government Licence
 To access the data, visit any page and add:
 /data.xml
 /data.rdf
 /data.xht
 For lists
 /data.feed
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27.  Re-use where we can, create where we must
 Small, high level, light weight vocabularies
 Examples include datacube, organization,
provenance
 Create local specialisations
 Examples include payments, central-government
 Post hoc linking
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28. qb:componentRequired : boolean
qb:DataStructureDefinition qb:ComponentSpecification qb:componentAttachment : rdfs:Class
qb:order : xsd:int
qb:sliceKey qb:componentProperty
qb:dimension
qb:structure qb:attribute
qb:componentProperty qb:measure
qb:DataSet qb:SliceKey
qb:slice
qb:sliceStructure
qb:ComponentProperty
qb:dataset
qb:concept
qb:Slice qb:DimensionProperty
qb:measureType
qb:subSlice
skos:Concept
qb:AttributeProperty
qb:observation
qb:Observation sdmx:Concept qb:MeasureProperty
qb:CodedProperty
sdmx:ConceptRole
qb:codeList
sdmx:FrequencyRole skos:ConceptScheme
sdmx:CountRole
sdmx:EntityRole
sdmx:TimeRole sdmx:CodeList
... 28

29. qb:structure
payer
foaf:Agent
qb:dataset PaymentDataset
payee
foaf:Agent
qb:slice
unit
org:OrganizationalUnit
date
payment interval:Interval
Payment
expenditureLine purchase
order Purchase
ExpenditureLine
invoice
narrative
amountIncludingVAT
contract
amountExcludingVAT
procurementCategory
transactionReference
expenditureCode vatCategory
vatRate paymentReference skos:Concept
totalAmountIncludingVAT
skos:Concept
item totalAmountExcludingVAT
redacted
revenue Item
capital
skos:Concept
29 ItemCategory

30.  *new* Government Linked Data
Working Group
 Provenance Working Group

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32. http://reference.data.gov.uk/id/day/2011-06-16
http://reference.data.gov.uk/id/department/CO
http://transport.data.gov.uk/id/station/WAT
http://education.data.gov.uk/id/school/341451
http://location.data.gov.uk/id/3245677362123
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/id/ukpga/2009/12/section/2

33.  http://reference.data.gov.uk/id/day/2011-06-1
 There are similar URIs for seconds, minutes,
hours, weeks, months, quarters, years
 We were a bit slow (170 years) to move from the
Julian to Gregorian Calendar (see the Calendar
Act, 1750)
 To transition, we lost 11 days in 1752
 Convoluted explanation of why the tax year in
the UK starts on the 6th April
 Our URIs for time intervals work this way too
and the British time intervals URI Set is linked
to the legislation

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35.  Malcolm Gladwell article on Ron Popeil from 2000 in
the New Yorker:
 ”And how do you persuade people to disrupt their lives?
Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being
famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention
to consumers - not once or twice but three or four times,
with a different twist each time. You have to show them
exactly how it works and why it works, and make them
follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell
them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally,
sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as
the gadget is, it's not at all hard to use.”

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40.  Open Standard
 Generic approach for creating APIs from
Linked Data
 Sits on top of a Linked Data store
 Several implementations, most mature is
Puelia
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45.  We will require public bodies to publish online
the job titles of every member of staff and the
salaries and expenses of senior officials paid
more than the lowest salary permissible in Pay
Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale, and
organograms that include all positions in those
bodies.

46.  October 2010
 CSV template and PDFs of organograms,
typically authored using Powerpoint
 Emphasis on visual appearance, led to
inconsistent datasets which are very hard to
re-use
 No relationship between the organogram and
data
 Not using web standards
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48. “The Government has published
the most comprehensive
organisational charts of the UK
Civil Service ever released online,
taking another step towards its
goal of being the most transparent
government in the world and
opening up the structure of the
Civil Service to public scrutiny”

49.  100s of UK Government Organisations have published
their organisation data as Linked Data
 Distributed data publishing
 It the largest number of organisations joining the Web
of Linked Data in a single day!
 The data is deeply linked (Departments, Grades ,
Professions, date of the snapshot)
 Cross dataset queries are perhaps the most
interesting
 Proves Linked Data is moving from research topic to
commodity publishing
 We can now extend this approach to other types of
dataset and link our transparency data
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50.  Make it as simple as possible for people in Departments to
create Linked Data
 Create high quality, consistent data that matches the
policy intent and guidance
 Distributed capture and publishing
 Create open data in open standards using open source
tools
 Human readable and machine readable from single source
 Provide download and API access in different formats
(CSV, XML, JSON, RDF, HTML)
 Evolutionary route to create longitudinal datasets,
reconciling against previous data
 Enable everyone to publish 5 Star Linked Data
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51.  Capture organisation data using a
spreadsheet, which verifies policy rules and
datatypes
 Upload spreadsheet
 Preview organogram
 Download RDF and two CSVs
 Publish on your website and register with
data.gov.uk
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52.  It’s the tool most Civil Servants have
 This *does* also work in Libre Office / Open
Office etc
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57. Organogram
HTML, CSS &
JavaScript
Excel file
HTML XML JSON
1. Upload Excel
Organogram (PHP) Linked Data API
2. Create 3. Create 4. Query 5. Create
CSVs Mapping (SPARQL) RDF
RDF file
Senior Junior Mapping API Config
6. Load
CSV CSV TRiG RDF
7. Query
XLWrap (SPARQL)
Sesame
TDB RDF Store
57 Reconciliation

59.  Implicit properties are made explicit (person,
role, person in a role)
 Reconciliation adds value by automatic
linking to other data
 Provenance
 Example data
 Explicit open licence

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62.  Linked Data is essential to realising the promise
of Open Government Data
 Using Linked Data means working on
 Standards
 Reference Data
 Production
 Publishing
 Lots of opportunities for international
collaboration
 Best advice, just start

63. email: john@johnlsheridan
Twitter: @johnlsheridan
Skype: johnlsheridan