Impending legislation will soon force government and the civil service to publish data currently unavailable to the public, presenting a big opportunity for innovation. Ahead of these changes, the Open Data Institute and The National Archives were in Belfast yesterday to open a dialogue on the environment surrounding open data. They showed how the UK is in a leading position in the open data movement in Europe but it is unclear where Northern Ireland stands in relation.
Hosted by two government departments, DETI and DFP, along with two knowledge sector institutions, NISP CONNECT and ECIT/CSIT, this standing-room-only event should hopefully boost a regional effort to pioneer open data innovation. One encouraging move is a commitment in NI government’s forthcoming Innovation Strategy to become a strategic partner of the Open Data Institute, acting as a node in the regional data community.
The panel discusses open data with a packed room at ECIT/CSIT. From left: Eoin McFadden, Innovation Policy Unit, DETI; Carol Tullo, Director of Information Policy and Services, The National Archives; Dr Ben Green, Research Director, SAP; Richard Stirling, Membership Programme Manager, Open Data Institute.
Perhaps the biggest player in this space is the public sector, with an enormous resource of existing data sets, covering every public interest from transport to health. By publishing their data, public bodies have given the world an asset from which new products and services have arisen with tangible human benefits. These range from the consumer end, such as the addition of hygiene ratings to restaurant listing websites, to harder issues such as improving NHS efficiency by graphically mapping the allocation of drug prescriptions. One much-lauded public data service is legislation.gov.uk, that disrupted the legal publishing industry by making legislative text discoverable online. Yet there is a shared sense that such developments represent only an early wave in what should instead be a rolling tide of beneficial new tools.
Richard Stirling, Membership Programme Manager at the Open Data Institute, explains the Institute’s role as a node in the innovation community
One of the grand issues for this space, with its overlapping movements such as Open Data, Big Data and Data Analytics, is that the data are there, we just have to work out what to do with it all. Any data-related report or event will typically open with some mind-bendingly large number, representing the total bytes of information already published in a particular sector. But the problem is often not the availability of data in the first place, it’s about technologists finding useful data sets and building products around them that help people in their daily lives. This has been an issue in the realm of public sector information, where potentially valuable data are already languishing unused on publicly accessible sites. In some cases the information has been published in a state that could be hard to work with, for instance where it has not been made machine-readable, or is simply inaccurate, but this doesn’t wholly account for the gap in potential innovation. To some extent it is just a lack of awareness or motivation from the product developers.
Although we already have access to an unmanageably large resource of public information, there’s much more to come. In the case of the public sector, many bodies are sitting on the majority of their data, lacking the incentives needed to drive publication. Many barriers stand in the way of these data sets seeing daylight. It starts internally, wherever departments aren’t speaking to each other or keep their data on systems that are built on incompatible structures, languages and parameters. Then externally, there is a forgivable fear of negative results from publication, such as harmful misuse or simply naïve misinterpretation. Add to this a general lack of familiarity with the processes and potential benefits of current technologies, and it’s hard to be optimistic about the future of public data. Furthermore, it’s not enough to show public servants the macroeconomic benefits of open data, or make illustrations of successful examples. Sometimes it takes a kick to drive change, not just a carrot. The good news is that the boot may be about to swing imminently. Seemingly driven by the G8′s recent Open Data Charter, and the current revisions to the ten year-old Public Sector Information Directive, public bodies will soon be obliged by law to publish their data by default. If enacted well, this could make it less risky to have the data out in the open than to sit on it any longer.
All across the public, private and academic sectors, the open data movement has produced some powerful innovations but there is much to play for. New legislation, matched with a global cultural shift towards connectivity and collaboration, could force open the floodgates and put a load of public data into creative hands. The public sector will soon have no choice but to publish so the challenge now is how to do it properly. It feels like this week’s open data event launched the dialogue ahead of these legal changes, and was welcomed by the audience. So, on the long road from framing the problem to improving lives on the ground, what’s next? Successful products and services are designed around real user needs so now the custodians of data sets must find environments in which they can gather public opinion to establish needs, and collaborate with developers, designers and communicators to solve them. Further reading on this topic in The United Kingdom Report on the Re-use of Public Sector Information 2013
Full house in the boardroom of ECIT/CSIT, part of Queen’s University Belfast situated at the Northern Ireland Science Park
