32. The UKGLF addresses the use and re-use of the following types
of information:
- non-personal information subject to copyright and database
right that is collected and produced by government and the
public sector and which is published or accessible under access
legislation such as the Freedom of Information Act or the
Environmental Information Regulations (much of this
information will be accessible on public sector web sites or
already published by the public sector);
- previously unpublished datasets released by the public sector
on portals such as data.gov.uk; and
- original and open source software and source code produced
by the public sector or commissioned under Framework 1 of the
NESTA agreements (see glossary) or similar agreements.
36. Take a look around you…
…see that plug socket? If you’re in the UK, it should conform to British
Standard BS1363 (you can read the spec if you have have you credit card to
hand…). Take a listen around you… is that someone listening to an audio
device playing an MP3 music file? ISO/IEC 11172-3:1993 (or ISO/IEC 13818-
3:1995) helped make that possible… “that” being the agreed upon standard
that let the music publisher put the audio file into a digital format that the
maker of the audio device knows how to recognise and decode.
(Beware, though. The MP3 specification is tainted with all sorts of patents –
so you need to check whether or if you need to pay someone in order to
build a device that encodes or decodes MP3 files.) If the music happens to be
being played from a CD (hard to believe, but bear with me!), then you’ll be
thankful the CD maker and the audio player manufacturer agreed to both
work with a physical object that conforms to IEC 60908 ed2.0 (“Audio
recording – Compact disc digital audio system”), and that maybe makes use
of Standard ECMA-130 (also available as ISO/IEC 10149:1995). That
Microsoft Office XML document you just opened somewhere? ISO/IEC
29500-1:2011. And so on…
40. “Standard - codified knowledge providing
specifications for interfaces between software, systems
or the documents and data that pass between them.”
[Open Standards Consultation – Glossary]
“*O]penstandards must allow all possible competitors
to operate on a basis of equal access to the ability to
implement the standard” [An Economic Basis for Open
Standards, RA Ghosh]
41. “ For the purpose of UK Government software
interoperability, data and document formats, the definition of
open standards is those standards which fulfil the
following[5] criteria:
42. are maintained through a collaborative
and transparent decision-making
process that is independent of any
individual supplier and that is accessible
to all interested parties;
44. Credit: Adam Cooper, CETIS
http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/adam/2008/03/18/beyond-standards-part-1/
45. are adopted by a specification or
standardisationorganisation, or a
forum or consortium with a feedback
and ratification process to ensure
quality;
48. as a whole have been implemented
and shared under different
development approaches and on a
number of platforms from more than
one supplier, demonstrating
interoperability and platform/vendor
independence;
49. owners of patents essential to implementation
have agreed to licence these on a royalty free
and non-discriminatory basis for implementing
the standard and using or interfacing with other
implementations which have adopted that same
standard. Alternatively, patents may be covered
by a non-discriminatory promise of non-
assertion. Licences, terms and conditions must
be compatible with implementation of the
standard in both proprietary and open source
software. These rights should be irrevocable
unless there is a breach of licence conditions.
Here we see the result of pulling data into a Google Spreadsheet from a CSV file published at a particular web address. We now have the ability to run the full range of spreadsheet tools over the data – data which is being pulled in from the datastore, remember.(A similar functionality presumably exists in Microsoft Excel?)
Through the provision of an API on top of the aggregated local council data, OpenlyLocal can also be treated as a database in its own right. In the example shown here, committee membership is displayed via a treemap showing party affiliations of committee members. (Hovering over a particular grouping displays a list of names of council members on that committee from that party political grouping.) Whilst it would be a major task to take data from every council website in a variety of formats in order to generate similar views for other councils, the work done by OpenlyLocal in aggregating this data and then republishing it via a single API in a single format means that the treemap view can be applied to each council whose data is stored in OpenlyLocal.In passing, it is also worth mentioning how the use of visualisations can be helpful in cleaning data or identifying possible errors in it. In the above example, we see that party affiliations for councillors on the Isle of Wight Council are declared as both Liberal Democrat and and Liberal Democrat Group.
