Data.gov.uk

Data.gov.uk

Oh, the excitement of it! Tim Berners-Lee is getting governments to listen to his cry, to set data free. Oh, the disappointment of our first look at the UK’s efforts! Where is the semantic data? Where are the ontologies to link concepts across datasets?

[For those of you not interested in the technical side of things skip over the next paragraph if you like - it's just technical ranting...]

This being a first pass the semantic data and the ontologies may be in there, but if they are they’re well hidden. There is a sparql page but no indication of which values are searchable. All the data sets I looked for were available in CSV and XSL; hardly linked. Turning one of the CSV data sets into RDF using well known namespaces took me about 30 minutes, so it shouldn’t be too hard for the site to get better, and quickly. Will it?

OK, that bit aside, the point is that the launch of this site seems to have been a deadline achieving exercise rather than an announcement of anything actually being ready. That being the case, somebody needs to put up their hand and say “That’s rubbish”.

It’s especially hard for me because I’m as excited about the possibilities of the semantic web as my more illustrious name-sake, but this ain’t those dreams, not even close. I was hoping to be able to complain loudly in the pub about my own useless government here in Ireland and how they weren’t doing anything to make their data available. “Look at how good the UK is”, I could have said. Oh well, another day.

So why am I so disappointed? What is this stuff anyway?
Well the semantic web can be a way to connect… well everything.

When I talk about a thing, say Sutton, I can link it to a description and eliminate any possibility that I am talking about a different Sutton. “Which Sutton?” you ask. “Sutton, Peterborough; Sutton, Craven etc…” and I answer “Exactly my point”. I can link it though:

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ontology/AdministrativeGeography/v2.0/AdministrativeGeography.rdf#osr7000000000001643

[N.B. Don't go to the above URL unless you want to download a massive file!]

which is a link to the Ordinance Survey UK’s ontology for Administrative places in the UK. If this excellent data (if a little limited, and a little out of date) is on the new data.gov site, then it’s hard to find. It would be a good way to tie geographic data sets together. An arbitrarily named field in an xls file is, on the other hand, not a good way to link data together.

Nice idea Tim, now you need them to actually do the work.

The other Tim