the week beginning 2nd December ’13 (Week 49)
Three days in London this week is not quite how I would have planned the week. That said a lot of positive steps in a number of areas of work which at least leaves some feelings of significant progress – so hopefully worthwhile trips.
On Tuesday I based myself out of the little Environment Agency enclave in Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru/Natural Resources Wales Cardiff office. Catching up with some of my old team and friends in between the usual web conferences and report writing.
We published the URI Patterns Challenge on the standards hub: standards.data.gov.uk/challenge/uri-patterns-for-identifiers for me as challenge owner a really important step towards having non-proprietary persistent identifiers on the web for data. The challenge is open for suggestions for the next two weeks and then proposals will follow based upon what is fed back. Hopefully, these will feed from the draft URI patterns bit.ly/11dkp1e and the draft URI patterns for Location Data bit.ly/1dAuaU2 activities of recent months.
Last week we announced what for me is an exciting event in early March 2014 that aims to take forward what has been an important area of interest to me and to many involved in both geospatial and open data standards. We have successfully pulled together a number of hugely important communities in the data, web and geospatial space.
This week spent some time highlighting this to some of the community and discussing what sound like some potentially interesting and insightful papers.
Wednesday saw the Defra Transparency Panel and Open Data Comms meetings where I presented updates on the Defra activities on the National Information Infrastructure (NII) and Open Data Strategy implementation (and imminent publication of the final version). Positive discussions and seemingly the ambition is growing to draw out use examples to help tell the story. I seem to have actions.
Later I met with the data.gov.uk team to discuss publishing guidance, INSPIRE, data harvesting, the map search, improving the data request tracking for the Defra Network and more. Lots of ideas and a real joint enthusiasm to try some new things.
Met with the Local Government Association to discuss INSPIRE and with GDS colleagues to discuss approaches to data with projects.
Thursday saw the INSPIRE Compliance board. As UK technical lead and INSPIRE Committee member for the UK rather an involved session. This includes drawing attention to the EU wide public consultation on the state of the implementation of the INSPIRE directive bit.ly/1k5JKEQ. We covered progress on a whole number of areas including the huge increase of datasets on data.gov.uk and the difficulties of transformation, work with the data.gov.uk team and transition to new working arrangements by April ’14.
Met (virtually) with colleagues and Jeni T to discuss the Open Data Certificates and how they would apply to the way we have done linked data services on environment.data.gov.uk a really productive discussion and lots to ponder for the future. Some certificated data to follow soon and hopefully some improvements to the way people can access our data and developer aspects such as: environment.data.gov.uk/api-config and environment.data.gov.uk/sources/bwq/eaew. Jeni highlighted the new guide to the Open Data Rights Statement Vocabulary theodi.org/guides/publishers-guide-to-the-open-data-rights-statement-vocabulary which will be an important part of our thinking in terms of what improvements we need to make. I have been looking at www.w3.org/TR/prov-overview as another aspect around how we could actually and more consistently describe the provenance of our data.
The journey back to Cardiff was a challenge with the rain and wind from the second large storm of the season battering the UK www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25220224 rather lucky not to be travelling to or through the worst hit areas. I can see that many of my Environment Agency colleagues must have been very busy.
The Environment Registry project (github.com/UKGovLD/registry-deploy-env) is progressing. The concept of providing a tool to enable the publishing and management of the code lists, vocabularies and other identifier sets for Defra and the Network. The EC has set up a workshop in January to discuss similar concepts and I’d hope to be ready to demonstrate where we have got to (alongside the work that has fed into the WMO amongst others – codes.wmo.int).
On Friday apart from finalising the Defra Open Data Strategy and closing off a few other things we had the regular (that I chair) UKGovLD and INSPIRE AIB calls catching up and updating on progress across a whole array of topics on Linked Data, URIs, Registries, Metadata, Geospatial Standards and INSPIRE.
Actually quite a busy week.
Lego London
END.
Alexander Coley 