Linked Spending Data – How and Why Bother Pt3

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

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

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