With so much chat and buzz at the moment (and rightly so) about Tim Berners-Lee et al’s data.gov.uk, I thought it’d be timely to say a bit about how we’ll be doing our bit towards publishing online consultation information as Linked Data (Steph Gray has recently blogged on a similar subject).
We’ve built (and are continuing to iteratively improve) Opinion Suite, an open-source online consultation management and creation system designed primarily for local authorities and other governing bodies. It’s currently being used by Bristol City Council, Sutton Borough Council and a large partnership led by Cumbria County Council, with more rollouts hopefully coming soon.
Through Opinion Suite, organisations can store, organise and publish details of all their consultations – hopefully, exactly the kind of information that it’d be really useful to be able to access from a variety of sources, to include in apps and to run analyses/queries on.
As you probably know, that’s what Linked Data is designed to facilitate; it’s a way of marking up web pages semantically so that software (like browsers, search spiders etc) can understand more about the content and so that it’s easier for citizens to ‘cut and combine’ the information in ways that are relevant to them. The Government’s into it in a big way: all central government consultations need to include this markup as of the start of 2010 and DirectGov already uses it to pull consultation details into its listings.
We’re currently making a few changes to the code of Opinion Suite so that all consultation details entered using the system are marked up as Linked Data – using RDFa, to be precise. This means that all consultations inputted into Opinion Suite will include this additional metadata, making the information therein more readily and widely available. So, for example, DirectGov could pick up all of a local authority’s consultation details and pull them directly into the ‘local consultations’ part of their site, or someone could make an app to compare consultation activity with other data, such as population or earnings surveys. That’s a lot of potential added value for something that’s really not that hard to do – and it won’t affect the appearance or user experience of Opinion Suite for end users or administrators as the data will be taken from existing fields.
It might also be worth mentioning that this is in addition to the existing RSS functionality built into Opinion Suite – for example, you can create an RSS feed from any search query in Consultation Finder, meaning you can take the content and embed it into a blog or community website.
Basically, we like sharing and we like making the most of data – so we reckon RDFa’s a good thing all round and an easy win in many ways.
