Three Steps to Open Up Your Data

TSO's OpenUp Platform

Examples of TSO's work

If you are a data publisher who needs to open up your data to meet the Government's transparency requirements and encourage re-use, we can help. TSO has been at the forefront of working with public sector clients to open up published data to improve transparency. Our experts help to create, structure, capture, transform and deliver some of the most important government information.

We are particularly expert in publishing regularly updated, fine grained data and our managed data publishing service provides an end-to-end approach to managing your data publishing, ensuring streamlined, reliable processes that enable simultaneous web publication in many different data formats.  www.legislation.gov.uk and www.london-gazette.co.uk are examples of regularly updated websites built on open linked data principles to enable the information to be re-used.

In this section you'll find information on:

• The three key steps to opening up data
• TSO's open data platform for data hosting and data transformation
• Examples of TSO's work

To speak to one of our experts about how we can help to open up your data, contact us: opendata@tso.co.uk

Read our white paper on Sustainable data publishing (PDF)

Three Steps to Open Up Your Data

We open up your data in three steps: creating tools and processes to allow data to be created in a structured way; transforming content into machine-readable formats; and providing and hosting web environments that allow both humans and machines to access the data. These services can be provided individually through our OpenUp Platform or together they form an end-to-end managed data publishing service delivering sustainable, reliable open data.

1 Creating and Capturing Your Data in a Structured Way

To enable your data to be reused it must be created in a structured way. Our experts will first work with you to understand the requirements for your data. Once this is established we will create tools and processes that will capture content in the most appropriate and efficient way, depending on the nature of your data, the number of users capturing it and their skill set. We have created tools and processes using MS Office templates, XML authoring tools and web portals for content validation and submission.

2 Enriching your Data to Enhance and Transform

To make your data open, linked and re-usable it must be unlocked from the usual print and web formats, which are only readable by humans, and converted into linked, machine-readable formats. TSO’s experts will use text analysis frameworks such as GATE to automatically enrich your content and extract information from it, enabling it to be converted into open formats, including RDF (the recommended format for linked data) XML, XHTML + RDFa and ATOM. The approach can be integrated with templates to improve the automation of your data publishing.

We have created a Data Enrichment Service which uses the GATE open source text analysis framework to automatically enrich your content and extract information from it, enabling it to be converted into linked formats, including RDF (the recommended format for linked data). You can transform content instantly by pasting, uploading or submitting your documents through the API.

TSO's standard Data Enrichment Service is free to use. For data publishers needing to enrich more than 10,000 documents per day with an SLA, we can offer the Professional version of the Data Enrichment Service for a monthly fee.

Try the Data Enrichment Service

3 Delivering Open, Reusable Data to Engage Citizens

The ultimate aim of opening up access to public data and creating it as machine readable, linked data is to enable the creation of new, more useful data applications. Through OpenUp we provide a scalable and secure environment for hosting your RDF data, making it simple to build the next generation of semantic web applications. Our platform is built on 5Store, a highly scalable, clustered, commercial RDF database storage and query engine, designed and developed by Garlik technology award winners and providers of the Data Patrol and QDOS systems. Several APIs are available to extract the data, including a SPARQL endpoint.

TSO's OpenUp Platform

We have developed a platform of integrated services that enables data to be stored, accessed and enriched. The OpenUp platform is available as Software as a Service (SaaS) enabling fast and cost-effective deployment. The services include:

• A highly scalable and secure RDF store for hosting RDF datasets
• A data harvesting system to control the acquisition of data
• A data enrichment service to transform human readable content into machine-readable formats
• Web development and web hosting services
• Professional data services to fit your specific needs, for example to create URI schemes and APIs

For more information see the OpenUp Platform section.

Examples of TSO's work

TSO developed an MS Word based drafting tool for The National Archives and relevant government departments to create secondary legislation. The template contains all elements in the development of a statutory instrument, including typesetting styles and metadata, enabling online validation, reducing errors and allowing a quicker publishing process. The template is used to create structured XML and print ready PDFs with website content generated automatically from source XML.

TSO has enriched the data in more than 250,000 notices on the London Gazette website using GATE to apply RDF and create machine readable data. The information in the London Gazette is now available in a range of formats including print, XHTML, XML and RDF and the data is versatile enough to re-use in combination with other data. An example data mash up can be found on the London Gazette website: www.london-gazette.co.uk/demo

Legislation.gov.uk was built on open data principles to enable information to be published as both human readable and machine-readable content. Users are able to browse the content online in accessible HTML format or download in accessible PDF format. The underlying data is also available in re-usable XML, RDF and ATOM formats through a published RESTful API.

Read about the launch of www.legislation.gov.uk at http://www.tso.co.uk/press/latestnews/archive/2010/legislation

To find out more about our open data services please contact us: opendata@tso.co.uk