INTEGRATING THE UK LOCATION INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE AND DATA.GOV.UK

R.Kedge

UK Location Programme, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA),London, UK

Achallenge faced by all governments in the European Community is how to leverage the benefits of their INSPIRE investments while at the same time having to do more with less in the current economic climate. In the UK this challenge is being met by maximising the use of government’s information assets, both spatial and non-spatial, and byadopting a set of design principles for the UK Location Information Infrastructure (UKLII) that support the reuse and exploitation of these assets without unnecessary additional costs.

This paper looks at the way in which the UKLII technical architecture has been integrated with data.gov.uk, the UK Government’s central portal for public sector data, and the issues, impacts, and benefits of this alignment for both the UK Location Programme tasked with delivering INSPIRE, and the UK Cabinet Office under which data.gov.uk has been developed to support the Government’s Transparency agenda. In particular it seeks to show the benefits of integrating spatial and non-spatial data within a single portal, with thegoal of being able to easily discover, link and exploit these information assets.

The UK Location Information Infrastructure is the overall architecture underpinning INSPIRE delivery that supports the reuse and exploitation of location data in the UK. This covers discovery of what data exists, the creation of ‘core geographic reference’ datasets and INSPIRE Themes, dataset interoperability,and data publishing, including rights management and charging. It is built upon a set of overarching design principlesset out in the UKLII Conceptual Design[1]which include:

  • a federated, collaborative “joint venture”, involving the public, private and third sectors;
  • minimum intervention to achieve the desired effect;
  • open standards;
  • re-using software, products and services in the market, including open source; and
  • a cross-government enterprise architecture.

Data.gov.uk [2] is the UK central government portal for providing access to public sector datasets. The aims of the portal are to show how government works and how policies are made, to provide access to data for all users, to enable innovation in the use of government data, and to support economic growth. There are approximately 5600 datasets on the portal covering all areas of government. The majority of these datasets, some 97% are non-spatial. While INSPIRE doesn’t mandate the development of a portal by Member States, the existence of Data.gov.uk in the UK and the greater benefits of being able to exploit spatial and non-spatial datasets together,led to the decision to adopt data.gov.uk as the portal for the Central Services and integrate it with the UKLII technical architecture.

This decision has impacted in a number of ways. While both the UK Location Programme and the data.gov.uk initiative share the common purpose of providing access to data, they do so from very different approaches, the former needing initially to meet the INSPIRE Regulations, the latter needing to publish data to open up government and encourage developer usage of this data. For example:

  • UK Location requires comprehensive metadata to the UK GEMINI2.1 standard, data.gov.uk requires more limited metadata;
  • UK Location requires interoperable datasets based on the INSPIRE Regulations and international standards, data.gov.uk requires datasets in re-usable form but does not impose data standards;
  • UK Location requires comprehensive metadata and data validation, data.gov.uk requires more limited quality assurance of content; and
  • UK Location requires harvesting, spatial search, visual evaluation, direct access download, transformation, and publishing capability,data.gov.uk requires only upload, search, evaluate, and download capability.

Theseextensive requirements and capabilities are not just on the UK Location side.Data.gov.uk is scaled to handle thousands of datasets and has excellent search capability. It has a major presenceon the web owing to its connection witha key government policy, and ithas extensive community networking capability including, forums, wikis, and blogs to support the developer community.

As a result of this integration there has been a need to extend the portal’s capabilities to accommodate UK Location application and process requirements and to adjust its orientation for a wider audience and broader range of content. This includes spatial datasets which government bodies such as the UK Land Registry charge for, and private sector datasets. This has necessarily required changes to the licensing and terminology used on the site. These changes are being put in place and the portal will continue to evolve as its role develops further.

The benefits of integrating the UKLII architecture with data.gov.uk include:

  • Data.gov.uk meets the UKLII design principle of reusing what already exists to reduce costs;
  • The approach aligns with the Government’s Transparency policy to open-up government to greater accountabilityby publishing more public data;
  • It helps minimise the number of government portals for public sector information and provides ‘one place to go’ for this data making it easier to find; and
  • It provides access to spatial and non-spatial data together. This will encourage reuse and exploitation of these information assets in the form of newideas, applications and services which it is believed will help improve public services and stimulate economic growth.

References

1UK Location Programme, ‘UK Location Information Infrastructure Conceptual Model’, 2009, < [accessed on 20 February 2011]

2Data.gov.uk, ‘Opening up government’, 2011, < on 20 February 2011]

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