What is a URI?  This is the question a colleague asked me yesterday.  Of course, he knew what it stood for (Uniform Resource Identifier), but he was asking what it was for and why they are interesting to government.  The initial answer is that it is essential for the idea of Linked Data, it is the process through which one bit of information is linked to another bit.  But I wanted to dig a bit deeper and explain the kinds of use of Linked Data that the government has in mind.

The Web is basically a document standard – a description of what constitutes a Web page, together with a process for describing it’s location (the URL) and so of linking from one to another.  When you do a Web search, for example using Google or Bing, then you get a list of documents in which the information you seek might be in. 

A URI enables a unique way to identify a particular bit of data inside the Web page, and so link one bit to another.  Thus it might be useful to distinguish London-the-place from the other London-the-places and from the several authors with surname London.  We can get some way towards this by intelligent contextual analysis, the approach that Microsoft, for example, told me they are taking.  This involves heavyweight data crunching using search technologies.  The URI approach is to identify something as distinctive,  for example, London the place in this particular geospatial location, and then give it a URI that others can use to refer to it to disambiguate it from all other occurrences of the concept or word.

This is the core idea of a URI, that a place, event, person, concept, document, or whatever can be given a unique identifier that others can use.  Of course you need to do something more than that, as Sir Tim Berners-Lee describes in his four steps:

1.  Use URIs as names for things
2. Use http URIs so that people can look up those names
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information using the W3C standards (RDF, SPARQL)
4. Include links to other URIs so that they can discover more things

 I usually add one more:

5.  the provider of a set of URIs provides a Lookup service to take the object being named and provide a URI for it (i.e. the converse of 2.)

 So what would be useful for government to do?  One fruitful area to explore are those things that come and go, or move around, or change.  For example MPs get appointed to serve in HM Government and then move around.  Giving each MP a URI so that every time a press release reports their activities would be helpful, particularly as they are often described in different ways.  Clicking on a URI link could take you to a page of information about them – for example their biography, committees they serve on etc, or, with a little macro on the side, a set of relevant links about them.  And then there might be URIs for Departments.  They come and go – when were they in existence?  What were their responsibilities?  Is there archived content about them?  What is the current list of Departments? That kind of information we know would be useful to provide, as we get asked for them

Those are two examples of sets of URIs that government could usefully run:  the MP names, and the list of Departments.  Another might be the roles that comprise HMGovernment, i.e. the Ministers.  Clearly at local government level the set of Local Authorities would be one that would be useful, so that one person referring to a public body would know it was the same one that another called by a different name or abbreviation. 

The government has developed a draft standard for designing sets of URIs and we are now exploring what core sets of URIs it would  be useful to provide.  Let us know and we’ll see if we can do so.

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I was in Boston last week.  It was lovely – the sun streaming through the red fall leaves and it was warm enough to walk around in just a shirt.

The event was the 10^th anniversary of a publisher service that I had conceived and proposed. Others have taken it on to create one of the most significant developments in academic publishing.  The idea is simple, but its execution hard.  That is to link the references at the end of an academic article to the article in another publishers’ database.  The problem is knowing where that other article is and coping with the fact that publishers buy and sell journals, thus shifting them around the place. The journal reader shouldn’t have to know where the cited article is, only to click and (with suitable permissions) get access to it.

We have similar issues in government.  We have data and information that the end-user wants to find that is distributed across many different places, and usually the user doesn’t care about which bit of government provides it. Moreover, there are changes that occur when Departments get closed and created, thus moving their online content around the place.

The two problems are similar – how do you get separate bodies to collaborate and how do you find and link to relevant information and data that will outlast major changes.

The publishers use a handle technology on which is built a Digital Object Identifier system.  Attached to each is a searchable metadata store that includes the current location.  By each publisher uploading all their bibliographic data to a central store, you can form automatic processes that link citations to the location of the cited article.  As articles move, their unique handle stays the same and only the location in the central datastore needs updating.

For government, we considered this but took a different approach to ensure all links work.  This is because government is essentially a closed system. So that is why we have adopted use of URLs as Unique Resource Identifiers, rather than a handle approach.  All websites are archived by The National Archives in such a way that the original URLs can be identified. Then each Department needs to introduce a piece of software that automatically redirects the link to the Department website if still there or to The National Archives if not. That way, links always work.

Both academic publishers and government share another important value for end-users.  They need to be able to know that the information they reach is authoritative. For publishers this means that it is peer-reviewed and the title of the journal broadly indicates the degree of reliance they can place on the results.  For government, the fact that it is a .gov.uk site means that it is the authoritative source of information.  Trust lies at the heart of both systems.

Likewise, end-users need to know if information is the most recent.  In academic publishing the date is the indicator with other information such as whether or not an article has been retracted (for example the original MMR vaccine paper was retracted).  In government, it is important to replace old information with new, while making sure that the old is still available through the archive, to avoid losing part of the history of the country.

This approach also underlies the Semantic Web applications we’ve been introducing.  Different types of information are distributed across the public sector, for example jobs and consultations. The question is how to find them and create useful aggregated services from them, both by government itself and for others.  The solution we’re implementing is the use of semantic web and specifically RDFa.  This is because RDFa is being searched and used by Google and Yahoo! and so is findable.  Single point of access services can then be created that point the user back to source.

There are many analogies between academic journals and website publishing in creating a good service for its customers and users.  It is useful to consider these and see how citizens can be given a better experience.  It is also useful to look at a lot of other channels – for example, news and information services.  Websites bring together many different aspects of information and communication and there is value to be had in looking at precedents and taking the best from them, while exploring how to use the Web most effectively to deliver services that online users want.

I felt proud to be back in Boston among old friends from around the world, celebrating something so significant. I’m looking forward to what we can achieve by working collaboratively across the public sector to make an equivalently important step change in user experience.

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We’ve been helping Cabinet Office with the Prime Minister’s initiative on data release.  Called Making Public Data Public, the PM appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt in June to oversee the creation of a single online point of access for all public UK government datasets.

On 10 June in his statement to the House of Commons on Constitutional Renewal, the PM announced that ‘… I believe we should do more to spread the culture and practice of freedom of information…So that Government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people, I have asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee to lead who led the creation of the World Wide Web, to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data in the web over the coming months.’

The intention is that a single online point of access becomes part of the routine operation of Departments with a live site running by the end of the year.   The Cabinet warmly endorsed all the actions the project is taking on the 15th September, after a presentation by Sir Tim.  I’ve helped by preparing a communication and engagement plan, David’s been supporting through his work on RDFa implementation across government and Adam drafting the guidance for Departments.

Colleagues in COI have been working on the site and there is an early preview of what the site could look like that was available yesterday for the developer community.  The project is appealing to open data developers to work with government to get this right. Developers can join in by signed up to the Google Group.

The developer community is full of bright ideas of how to use government data and what they need to develop public services – just look at some of the great initiatives started already: Show Us a Better Way, the Power of Information Taskforce, MySociety and Rewired State.  It’s work in progress, and there’s still a lot to do. You can follow progress on #opendata on Twitter.

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