TSO OpenUp Event

On Wednesday 23 March, we held the first TSO OpenUp event in London to announce the winner of our OpenUp contest and host presentations from leading open data experts.

Following the launch of the OpenUp contest, which encouraged the general public to come up with ideas for re-using government data for the greater good of the community, four finalists were shortlisted and invited to pitch their ideas to a panel of open data experts at the stunning venue, Altitude 360 in London.

After much debate and careful consideration by the panel, Professor Nigel Shadbolt announced Tony Hirst and his idea for providing Access to UCAS University Course Data as the winner of TSO's OpenUp challenge. Tony's idea, which aims to allow easier comparison for university applicants, earned him a £1000 personal prize and a £50,000 development fund to turn the idea into reality.

High Profile, Informative Speakers

Whilst the four competition finalists presented their ideas to the judging panel, three expert speakers presented on the challenges and benefits of opening up data:

  • John Sheridan, Head of Legislation Services, The National Archives
    Better services, more efficiently - the legislation.gov.uk story
  • Jeni Tennison, Independent Consultant
    The wonderful world of URIs
  • Paul Davidson, Chief Information Officer
    The challenges that are being faced by the Government in making its data transparent

You can view the informative talks and the follow up Q&A session at http://geocasttv.com/tso/ and download the accompanying presentations by selecting the links below.

John Sheridan

Presentation (PDF)

Jeni Tennison

Presentation (PDF)

Paul Davidson

Presentation (PDF)

OpenUp Demonstration Zone

Also at the event, TSO experts demonstrated the benefits of opening up data at the OpenUp Demonstration Zone. Here we invited our guests to explore our latest innovations in digital content management available through the TSO OpenUp Platform.

These include:

  • Data hosting – highly scalable and secure data and RDF storage Data transformation
  • Taking human readable content and turning it into machine-readable linked data formats Professional data services
  • Helping you to structure your data and make it easily accessible

Contact Us

If you would like to discuss your open data requirements with one of our experts please email us at opendata@tso.co.uk