Scottish Government Data

How can we make it really useful?

Peter Winstanley LHD-12 Boston, MA. 2012-11-12

We publish loads of data!!• Agriculture, Fisheries and Rural • Business, Enterprise and Energy • Children and Young People • Crime and Justice • Economy • Environment • Health and Community Care • Housing and Regeneration • Labour Market • Lifelong Learning • Local Government Finance • Planning • Population and Migration • School Education • Social and Welfare • Tourism and Culture • Transport and Travel

…but not in easily reusable formats

…spreadsheets with formats & text

PDFs….so let’s find the raw data…

…with difficulty….

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…but with success in sight…

Download

Reach for BeautifulSoup… it’s HTML

And when I do find CSV …

.. it is interspersed with text

All Persons

Males

Females

It is not all this bad ….

It is not all this bad ….XML & CSV download of all the data

http://www.sns.gov.uk

… even Linked Data!!

http://cofog01.data.scotland.gov.uk/datasets

We are dedicated to publishing data…

So:

• Given that there is no magic wand,

• what are the most effective things we can do to make the data more re-usable?

Thoughts …

• Do we…..

• Publish terminologies (data dictionaries)?

• Publish URI sets for ‘things’ -- real-world things and concepts?

• Focus on a few datasets and make them perfect? [what is perfect?]

I am looking for…

• Recommendations

• Exemplars

• Collaborations

peter.winstanley@scotland.gsi.gov.uk