Comments on: What sets of URIs should we create?

By: Nathan Surendran

Nathan Surendran — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:44:52 +0000

David, I like your example of MP’s. There’s an interesting NGO push to bootstrap a similar db in the states. http://www.whorunsgov.com. Might give you some ideas for the data sets and groupings, ways to present the data, etc. The open source platform that runs the site is interesting too… I’d say it may be of more use to Graham H perhaps?

Hope that’s helpful.

Nathan

By: David Pullinger

David Pullinger — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:44:45 +0000

Thank you Rick and Graham for helpful comments.

Graham, I’ve been talking to Parliament about them minting their URIs, and I hope this can happen. I know many will find that helpful, not least it would mean the Departments don’t need to spend lots of time rewriting biographies.

Rick, that’s an interesting point about where and how we handle merging and changing organisations, when what they are responsible for persist. Government central Departments change and their responsibilities change, even though the public services continue ‘under new management’.

David

By: Graham Higgins

Graham Higgins — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:30:40 +0000

At the moment, I’m using purl.org URLs in an effort after neutrality. I thought it could well be seen as inappropriate for HMGovernment to mint URIs for Members and Lords of Parliament and I presume that Parliament itself will, at some point in the future, mint its own URIs.

e.g.

http://purl.org/UKPARLIAMENT/2009/10/ukparl

The URL resolves to a resource on my server, a file of RDF that contains a combined ontology and population of individuals. The source is RDF, it presents in a browser as HTML.

Some more info here: http://bel-epa.com/notes/ParlParse/

Still working on it, hope to make some progress during the break.

Cheers,

Graham.

By: Rick Mason

Rick Mason — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:59:16 +0000

Some thoughts which spring to mind:

Schools – a national list of schools based on the unique OFSTED code. The OFSTED code includes a code for the local education authority, which could link with owl:sameAs to the list of local authorities. It’s best for central government to own the list of schools rather than local authorities because then independent schools will be included.

Constituencies/Electoral divisions/wards. Central government can link constituencies to MPs, parliamentary questions, Select Committees and so on. Local government can link electoral divisions and wards to councillors and committees.

The NLPG. This has a unique reference number for every property (UPRN) and street (USRN) in the country, so it’s ideal for linking to lots of other data. The data is managed by local authorities but central government should ensure (either by doing it, or mandating how to do it) that it has a consistent set of URIs across the county so that a street in Cornwall uses the same URI set as one in Lanarkshire.

The metadata terms already used by local government, hosted at http://www.esd.org.uk. For example the LGSL which lists every service local government must provide would be useful to link data about the same service as provided by councils across the country.

On a slightly different tack, in the same way as you’re not minting URIs based on the current names of Government departments, provide a way for local government to mint URIs it is responsible for in the central *.data.gov.uk namespace, with the URI of the responsible local authority as a property of each item in the namespace. Don’t ask us to mint URIs in our http://data.councilname.gov.uk namespaces, because councils change: they merge or split into unitary authorities, counties like Middlesex disappear, police forces and NHS trusts merge and so on. It may not happen all the time but if we want these URIs to last central government is the only bit we can rely on to still be there (even if it changes in form).