Closing plenary: 'The future of public sector websites', at Building Perfect Council Websites 11, 14 July 2011 #BPCW11 Speakers: Paul Davidson and Ingrid Koehler

1. Hosted by:
Closing Plenary:
The Future of Public Sector Websites
Paul Davidson, Head, Local e-Government Standards Body
and CIO, Sedgemoor DC
Ingrid Koehler, Associate, FutureGov
Co-Chairs:
Dan Jellinek, Editor, E-Government Bulletin
Martin Greenwood, Director, Socitm Insight Programme
Gold Sponsors:

2. Public data transparency and open
standards.
• Building Perfect Council Web Sites,
• Olympia 2 Conference Centre, London .14th July 2011
Paul Davidson, CIO Sedgemoor District Council and Director of Standards of the Local e-Government
Standards Body (LeGSB)

3. Points of view ...
• Sedgemoor District Council
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedgemoor
– http://statistics.data.gov.uk/id/local-authority/40UC
– http://www.sedgemoor.gov.uk/opendata
• Local e-Government Standards Body (LeGSB)
– Mission to promote eStandards that support Efficiency, Transformation, and Transparency of Local Services
• Cabinet-Office CTO Council
– Cross Government Enterprise Architecture, and Domains
– Information Domain
– Semantics, Syntax, Data Quality, Rights, Authentication, Transport, Governance
– UK eGIF , GDSC, eGMS, PSIA
– Information Standards to support the Infrastructure initiatives from the government ICT Strategy
• UK Location Council
– Interoperability Working Group
– Linked Data Working Group
• Transparency Strategy Standards Group
– With COI, OPSI
• European Interoperability Architecture Working Group
– Trusted Information Exchange Group

4. Public Data / Open Data
• Public Data
– "Public Data" is the objective, factual, non-personal data on which
public services run and are assessed, and on which policy decisions
are based, or which is collected or generated in the course of public
service delivery.”
– Working definition of “Public Data at data.gov.uk

5. Public Data Principles at data.gov.uk
• Public data policy and practice will be clearly driven by the public and businesses who want and use the data, including what data is released when and in what form – and
in addition to the legal Right To Data itself this overriding principle should apply to the implementation of all the other principles.
• Public data will be published in reusable, machine-readable form – publication alone is only part of transparency – the data
needs to be reusable, and to make it reusable it needs to be machine-readable. At the moment a lot of Government information is locked into PDFs or other
unprocessable formats.
• Public data will be released under the same open licence which enables free reuse, including
commercial reuse – all data should be under the same easy to understand licence. Data released under the Freedom of Information Act or the new Right to
Data should be automatically released under that licence.
• Public data will be available and easy to find through a single easy to use online access point (data.gov.uk) – the public sector has a myriad of different websites, and
search does not work well across them. It’s important to have a well-known single point where people can find the data.
• Public data will be published using open standards, and following relevant recommendations of the
World Wide Web Consortium. Open, standardised formats are essential. However to increase reusability and the ability to compare data it also means
openness and standardisation of the content as well as the format.
• Public data underlying the Government’s own websites will be published in reusable form for others to use – anything published on Government websites should be
available as data for others to reuse. Public bodies should not require people to come to their websites to obtain
information.
• Public data will be timely and fine grained – Data will be released as quickly as possible after its collection and in as fine a detail as is possible. Speed may mean that the
first release may have inaccuracies; more accurate versions will be released when available.
• Release data quickly, and then re-publish it in linked data form – Linked data standards allow the most powerful and easiest re-
use of data. However most existing internal public sector data is not in linked data form. Rather than delay any release of the data, our recommendation is to release it ‘as
is’ as soon as possible, and then work to convert it to a better format.
• Public data will be freely available to use in any lawful way – raw public data should be available
without registration, although for API-based services a developer key may be needed. Applications should be able to use the data in any lawful way without
having to inform or obtain the permission of the public body concerned.
• Public bodies should actively encourage the re-use of their public data – in addition to publishing the data itself, public
bodies should provide information and support to enable it to be reused easily and effectively. The Government should also encourage and assist those using public data
to share knowledge and applications, and should work with business to help grow new, innovative uses of data and to generate economic benefit.
• Public bodies should maintain and publish inventories of their data holdings – accurate and up-to-date records of data collected and held, including their format, accuracy
and availability.

6. ... for scrutiny

7. Making data meaningful?
• Spending on maintaining the roads has more meaning when you know
the length of roads in the council area, and perhaps the number of road
surface related traffic accidents in the area.
• Spending on Schools has more meaning when you know the number
of school age children and the exam pass rates.
• You may want to find those councils that spend a lot more or less than
their neighbours on a particular type of product
• You might find a pattern between the spending on a certain type of
product and the political control of a council.

8. Applying eStandards to Transparency
• Semantic standards:
– Publishing Reference Data - giving a web address for each actual instance of things like Addresses, Services,
Organisations
– Publishing vocabularies - so that we describe things using common terms, like Customer Segmentation types, geographic
features and so on.
– Publishing definitions - of the terms that appear in data, and how they can be related to other terms. These models (or
ontologies) then enable us to join up data that use the same models.
• Syntax standards:
– Extending the reach of data, by making it available in a range of formats to suit the needs of many audiences. That may be
pdf, html, rtf for those that just want to read it, or CSV, XML, RDF, json etc. for those who want to manipulate the data
• Quality standards:
– Standardising a way of making quality statements about a set of data, which can be consistently applied to all types of
data.
• Rights:
– Public Open Data typically does not have privacy issues and therefore does not need to consider consent or legal
gateways.
– The license terms by which data is offered for re-use do need to be expressed in a standard way, and remain connected to
the data even after it has been moved, so that consumers can quickly determine if they are able to comply.

9. An Open Licence?
• http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence

10. Syntax?
• For Humans
– Web pages ( e.g. HTML )
– Documents ( e.g. PDF, RTF )
• For Download and Manipulation
– Tabular ( e.g. csv )
– Geographical ( e.g. KML )
• For Machines
– For Applications ( e.g. XML )
– Linked Data ( e.g. RDF, OWL,
URIs ... )
– Over the Web ( e.g. Web
Services, APIs )
Adapted by LG Group from diagram produced by Ian Painter, Snowflake

11. Defining formats for the local sector
• Guidance on how to publish data sets from the LGA and the LG Group.
http://lgtransparency.readandcomment.com/

12. ... for instance ...

13. Payments to suppliers for Goods and Services

14. A case study: CIPFA
The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy - http://www.cipfa.org.uk/
Context
• Local Authorities define their own financial codes to account for their budgets and expenditure. This
can make it hard to compare or combine financial data from many councils.
• CIPFA provide the ‘Service Reporting Code of Practice for Local Authorities ( SeRCOP )’, which
contains a series of income/expenditure headings and definitions, which Local Authorities use in their
financial systems to group their local services.
• This was originally developed to establish proper practices with regard to consistent financial reporting
for services across Local Government, and has legislative backing by regulations which identify the
accounting practices it propounds as proper practices under the Local Government Act 2003.
• SeRCOP headings therefore provide a consistent language that can be used to compare financial data
across local authorities.
Then
• The full edition of SeRCOP only used to be available to purchase directly from CIPFA in hard-
copy, or as a document on a CD ROM.
Now
• CIPFA have now published the headings under the Open Government Licence, meaning they are
free to be re-used without charge.
• This has been placed on the web at www.cipfastats.net/sercop<http://www.cipfastats.net/sercop as a
spreadsheet and set of URIs at http://doc.cipfa.org.uk/CipfaLists.aspx.
Outcome
• Local Authority spending data could now be published as Linked Data referring directly to the
SeRCOP headings so that data from many councils can be combined and queried over the web.
14

15. Aggregating and Querying
http://linked4.org/lsd/explore.html

16. Bristol C.C. Air Quality Data
• Making the data meaningful and comparable

17. Measured at?

18. As Linked Data?
• With Bristol C.C., Defra, Ordnance Survey, data.gov.uk

19. ... so what ...
• Viewing
– Provide an HTML view of the data with click-able links to definitions from the Ontology, and
identifiers.
– Shows the map points
– Can have custom layout in html using xslt
– Can slice the data via an API Call
• Combining
– Can combine data with other Air Quality Data from other sources using the same Ontology
– Can combine with demographics, health incident statistics, traffic counts, carbon emissions etc
• Defining
– Threshold levels of air quality and health consequences
– Pollutants
• Linking
– For a given point, location
– what are the administrative geographies
– What air quality measuring points are within a radius / box

20. Really Useful Budgets

21. Architecting it ...

22. Commissioning Services

23. Data Publishing Groups
• Bristol City Council
– Environmental Monitoring / Air Quality
– Defra, UK Location Council, data.gov.uk
• Windsor and Maidenhead
– Financial Publishing and Reporting
– CLG, CIPFA, Suppliers of Financials Systems
• Dudley Council
– Geographic standards
– Ordnance Survey
• Devon County Council
– Policies, Strategies, Commissioning Services
– Joint Strategic Needs Assessment
– CLG
• Cabinet Office
– ICT Asset Register
– CTO Council, data.gov.uk

24. Legsb
The Local e-Government Standards Body
Info@legsb.gov.uk
www.legsb.gov.uk

26. Open data

27. Open documents
http://iainroberts.mycouncillor.org.uk/2011/05/24/roads-repaired/
marks zero by Dave Bleasdale on Flickr

28. Location, location, location
http://www.coventrypct.nhs.uk/YourHealth/SexualHealth/App
http://www3.hants.gov.uk/iphone.htm

29. Openly social
http://bigcityplan.birmingham.gov.uk/

30. Information as a council
service

31. Community management

32. Information as a co-
produced service
Orange tree by red door by badjonni on Flickr

33. Planning to be open

34. Open leadership
• open politics
• balance
• links to/from
council websites

35. FutureGov
ingrid@ wearefuturegov.com
www.twitter.com/ingridk