Presentation (PDF) - OpenUp

Transparency, open data
and legislation.gov.uk
John Sheridan
23 March 2011

“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.”
The Coalition Agreement.

“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.”
The Coalition Agreement.

Why does legislation matter?
Legislation
Vote

An old slide (from 2005)
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Legislation as data
• Three considerations for legislation as data
o Typographic layout
o Versioning / changes over time
o Semantics
• Semantic representation using RDF and Linked Data
o URIs for things
o RDF data model
o subject - property - object
• Requires granular URIs to name things
o Identifier
o Document
o Representation
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Not all information is equal
• Publishing digital information changes the form of the
content
• The facts on which £ billions turn or that impact on people’s
lives require different treatment from the ephemeral – not
least to ensure the integrity of the public record
• Who is making information available, by what right, what
processes has it been subject to, become key questions
• Increasingly important to express provenance for high-end
sources of information, such as legislation.gov.uk
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Transparency and legislation.gov.uk
• Transparency means turning inside-out
• Opening legislation data is enabling transformation of our
operating model:
o
o
Expert participation for revising legislation
Commercial, academic and policy incentives
• Our provenance data is also our performance data
• Publishing all the management information from the
contractor helps us to be more efficient
• Transparency incentivises the contractor to perform well too
(if you are performing well, the data is better than a written
reference, and encourages above standard service)
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