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Day Month Year
Transforming the way people use Legislation information
Peter Camilleri – Business Development Director
TSO –Part of the Williams Lea Group 0

2. 1
About TSO
 Long-established UK firm employing 365 staff
 Offices in London, Norwich, Edinburgh and Belfast
 Part of:
 Contract publisher
 Digital solutions vendor
 Over 60 UK-based developers and 8 project managers
 OpenUp® Semantic Platform & Semantic Team

3. 2
TSO Service Scope

4. 3
Some of our clients

5. TSO – Sensitive – Part of the Williams Lea Group 4
 51 million hits per month
 20 searches per second
 2 million unique visitors a month
 6.5 Million documents and growing
 First Linked Data Statute Book in the world

6. 5
TSO‟s Legislation Journey
1889
HMSO
19962000 2005
2007 2010
2007 2010
20062004
2010
Legislation ITT
1996
2009
Transparency Agenda
Efficiency Board Formed

7. www.Legislation.gov.uk
 Developed by TSO for
 The Official Portal for UK
Legislation
 1267-Present
 Contains enacted and revised
legislation
 One of Government’s most visited
sites
 51 Million hits per month
 1.6 Million hits per day
 1200 searches every minute

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Motivation behind the new legislation.gov.uk system
ENACTED REVISED
 OPSI for Enacted Legislation
 Statute Law Database for
revised legislation
 Each was run by 2 different Govt
entities (OPSI & SPO which
merged)
 High costs maintaining two sites
 Users were using wrong sites
(didn’t know where to look)
 Needed to reduce Govt sites to
save costs
 Legislation needed to be more
accessible to the new mobile
devices
 Moving from a “Push” to a “Pull”
world
Built to consolidate two legacy websites:

9. Requirements for the website /publishing system
 Had to be Open Standards based
 Data format to be flexible, open and accessible
 Had to be very fast and responsive
 Had to be easy to use
 Had to support Native XML
 Metadata as RDF
 Had to support Linked Open Data (Government’s Transparency Agenda)
 Data needed to be portable
 Data needed to be accessible by multiple devices

10. Database Selection Process
 2 month process
 Evaluated 12 candidate databases solutions
 Selection Criteria
 Needed to try to get the best value for the taxpayer
Functionality Robustness XQuery Compliance Support
Scalability Performance Standards based Belief in the vendor

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The 2010 Legislation Tender
 Bid Submission June 2010
 Contract commenced 1st Feb 2011
 Changed from traditional publishing to digital
 Capture – Transformation – Dissemination
 Innovative approach to delivering legislation
 TSO began preparations 12mths in advance
 User Experience research
 Data use and re-use
 Performance Management System
 New project management approach
“Innovation involves deliberate application of information,
imagination and initiative in deriving greater or different
value from services”

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Capture - Submission
 Streamlined the way legislation is submitted
 Removal of the manual processes
 Digital Validation
 Automated extraction of metadata

13. Data Enrichment
Service
Infrastructure for automated extraction processes
Starter DES
(generic)
annotator
 Company names
 Organisation names
 Towns
 Countries
 Dates
 Facilities
 Events
and others…
 Wikipedia
 data.gov.uk
 Ordnance Survey
 GeoNames
 London Gazette
and others…
Entities extractedData sources

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Capture - Submission
 Streamlined the way legislation is submitted
 Removal of the manual processes
 Validation
 Automated extraction of metadata
 User certifies submission
 Tracking

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Capture - Registration
 New tools for the Statutory Instruments Registrar
 Streamlining the registration process
 Joining up the legislation publishing lifecycle
 Approval checks
 Automation of existing processes

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Dissemination – the Legislation.gov.uk site
 Developed award-winning website
 Fast search and retrieval
 Ease of use and many ways to access legislation
 “Points in time” view of legislation
 URIs- access granular levels of data
 Feature-rich
„Best example of ICT-enabled innovation and enterprise‟
(UK Public Sector Awards 2011)

17. The First Linked Data Statute Book in the World
Linked Data describes a method of publishing
structured data so that it can be linked to other data
and become more useful.
Rather than data available purely to serve web pages
for human readers, it extends data so it can be read
automatically by computers.
Enables data from different sources to be connected
and queried.
In response to the Government‟s “Linked Data” Initiative

18. Structured way of publishing data to facilitate linking to other data and resources
Allows relationships between things to be expressed
Facilitates navigation between information sources
Enables creation of new products from existing data
Re-aggregation of data into new information sources
Facilitates creation of “mash-ups”
Makes data more useful
Linked Open Data is Linked Data that is free to use
TSO Non-Sensitive
What does Linked Data allow?

19. TSO Non-Sensitive 18
Why are Governments opening up their data?
To achieve important national benefits for both the Nation and its citizens
including:
1. Encourage growth and the creation of companies and jobs
2. Increase discovery and transparency
3. Higher innovation, entrepreneurship
4. Encourage technological innovation
5. More informed, empowered and satisfied citizens

20. What can you do with Linked Open Data?
“Mash ups”- pulling data from various sources- Visualisations

21. TSO Non-Sensitive
Combine different data sets

22. TSO Non-Sensitive
Legislation.gov.uk - part of “The Semantic Web”
Legislation.gov.uk
Data.gov.uk
Gazettes.gov.uk
Legislation.gov.uk
data.gov.uk
Gazettes

23. Harvest Enrich Store Publish
Aggregation
of data from
web, APIs
databases
and files
Extracting
useful data
and
converting to
re-usable
formats
Highly
scalable
database
storage and
query engine
Websites and
APIs to reach
data users
Automated processes that deliver reliable data
How do we do this? Via OpenUp® - TSO‟s Linked Data Platform

24. TSO Non-Sensitive 23
Using OpenUp® for Legislation.gov.uk
Automated process:
 Harvests Data from Legislation.gov.uk
 Enriches the content via the Data Enrichment Service
 Creates the URIs
 Creates RDF triples
 Stores RDF in the TSO triple store
 Exposes RDF for querying via SPARQL endpoints and APIs
 Third parties access RDF and pull it from the store

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Legislation.gov.uk data re-use by 3rd parties
Examples:

26. Updating legislation- complex process: assisted by Semantic
technologies

27. Semantics assist locating legislation that has been affected

28. TSO Non-Sensitive 27
Bottle-neck in updating legislation
25,000 changes per year
Too many changes for in-house editors to
cope with
Expert Participation Model
 Revision of legislation by 3rd parties
 Tools & techniques to update legislation
 Vetted users from legal publishers and voluntary organisations assist with
updating of legislation

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Summary – Legislation.gov.uk
 Have we succeeded in what we set out to do?
 Improving access for the public, for businesses and for computers
 Saving Government money
 Transformed legislation publishing
 Exceeding performance measures

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Closing
John Sheridan, Head of Legislation Services, The National Archives
‘We are extremely proud of what has been achieved with TSO, it really is a
world first and an exemplar for what can be achieved with open data if it is
approached correctly. Third parties are already building mobile device and
other online applications that use the data and API we created. There is a
vast community accessing one dataset, in different ways, through different
means, freely and easily. That is exactly what we wanted.’

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Thank you
Want to discuss further?
peter.camilleri@tso.co.uk
0771 8695273

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© 2012 Williams Lea Group
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This document may be incomplete without reference to any oral briefing provided by WL, reflects current
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