I met today with John Sheridan, Head of e-Services, Office of Public Sector Information, The National Archives, located at the Ministry of Justice, London, UK. Also at the meeting was John’s colleague Clare Allison. John and I had met at the ICAIL conference in Barcelona, where we briefly discussed our interests in applications of Semantic Web technologies to legal informatics in the public sector. Recently, John got back in contact to talk further about how we might develop projects in this area.
Perhaps most striking to me is that John made it clear that the government (at least his sector) is proactive, looking for research and development projects that make government data available and usable in a variety of ways. In addition, he wanted to develop a range of collaborations to better understand the opportunities the Semantic Web may offer.
As part of catching up with what is going on, I took a look around the web for relatively recent documents on related activities.
- Blog notes on a meeting in Feb. 2009 of BarCamp-UKGovWeb which contains a discussion of open government and re-using government data.
- Slide presentation by John Sheridan at the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information, Dec. 2008.
- Blog notes from Talis on open government
- A podcast with John Sheridan about open government.
- Slides by Tom Heath on Linked Data.
In our discussion, John gave me an overview of the current state of affairs in public access to legislation, in particular, the legislative markup and API. The markup is intended to support publication, revision, and maintenance of legislation, among other possibilities. We also had some discussion about developing an ontology of goverment which would be linked to legislation.
Another interesting dimension is that John’s office is one of a few that I know of which are actively engaged to develop a knowledge economy partly encouraged by public administrative requirements and goals. Others in this area are the Dutch and the US (with xml.gov). All very promising and discussions well worth following up on.
Copyright © 2009 Adam Wyner
John is great at actively engaging with people and has supported the OpenPSI project (http://www.openpsi.org) a collaboration between the University of Southampton and the UK government, lead by OPSI at the National Archive, to trial of a new form of community provisioned information service that is attempting two things:
1) trying to spark interaction between government information providers, academic researchers and information intermediaries, specifically to bridge the gap between those researchers who may not have all the technical skills or data knowledge to answer important research questions.
2) provide a linked data service using Semantic Web standards to provide an integration point for UK governmental sourced information.
http://www.openpsi.org
Yeah, John is a great guy, and if they say they are willing to be proactive, unless otherwise prevented he will make sure they do all they can. There are certainly improvements that can be made for the benefit of all but the markup will certainly be improved with John and his team on your side. Best of luck.