Category: Local Government

Is There Still a Case for Aggregations of Cultural Data

Posted on by Richard Wallis

A bit of a profound question – triggered by a guest post on Museums Computer Group by Nick Poole CEO of The Collections Trust about Culture Grid and an overview of recent announcements about it. Broadly the changes are that: The Culture Grid closed to ‘new accessions’ (ie. new collections of metadata) on the 30th April The existing index and API will continue to operate in order to ensure legacy support Museums, galleries, libraries and archives wishing to contribute material to Europeana can still do so via the ‘dark aggregator’, which the Collections Trust will continue to fund Interested parties …

A Video Conversation

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Today I share a conversation with my good friend and former colleague Paul Miller of Cloud of Data. Paul is a prolific podcaster, but had yet to venture in to the world of the video conversation.  This conversation was therefore a bit of an experiment.  Take a look below and see what you think.   For those that prefer audio only, Paul has helpfully included an mp3 for you to listen to. At the end of this post you will also find a link to a short survey which has posted to ascertain how successful this format. In the conversation itself …

Will This Flood of Open Data Wash Past Us?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

 @ePISplatform features fairly prominently in the stream of tweets that waft across my desktop every day – it comes from the European Public Sector Information (PSI) Platform (Europe’s One-stop Shop on PSI re-use) Working to stimulate and promote PSI re-use and open data initiatives. In amongst the useful pointers to news, comment, and documents, I have been recently conscious of an increasing flow of tweets like these: This is good news.  More and more city, local, national governments and public bodies releasing data as open data.  Of course the reference to open here is in relation to the licensing of …

Linked Spending Data – How and Why Bother Pt3

Posted on by Richard Wallis

As often is the way, events have conspired to prevent me from producing this third and final part in this How & Why of Local Government Spending Data as soon as I wanted.  So my apologies to those eagerly awaiting this latest. To quickly recap, in Part 1 I addressed issues around why pick on spending data as a start point for Linked Data in Local Government, and indeed why go for Linked Data at all.  In Part 2, I used some of the excellent work that Stuart Harrison at Lichfield District Council has done in this area, as examples …

Linked Spending Data – How and Why Bother Pt2

Posted on by Richard Wallis

I started the previous post in this mini-series with an assumption – ..working on the assumption that publishing this [local government spending] data is a good thing. That post attracted several comments, fortunately none challenging the assumption.   So learning from that experience I am going to start with another assumption in this post.  Publishing Local Authority data, such as local spending data, as ‘Linked Data’ is also a good thing.  Those new to this mini-series, check back to the previous post for my reasoning behind the assertion. In this post I am going to be concentrating more on the How …

Linked Spending Data – How and Why Bother Pt1

Posted on by Richard Wallis

National Government instructing the 300+ UK Local Authorities to publish “New items of local government spending over £500 to be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011” has had the proponents of both open, and closed, data excited over the last few months.  For this mini series of posts I am working on the assumption that publishing this data is a good thing, because I want to move on and assert that [when publishing] one format/method to make this data available should be Linked Data. This immediately brings me to the Why Bother? bit. This itself breaks in to …