This week at the SemTech Biz DC Conference, Jim Hendler, advisor to Data.gov, explained the history of the “friendly competition” between the US data.gov and data.gov.uk and said that the latter had about 6000 data sets that were in better shape than the former. So I decided to take another look and was very impressed.

Hendler also said that the UK Government has designed and made great use of standard Web address practices in their linked data and moved even further ahead of the US in open data with creation of the Open Data Institute.

First I decided to help myself and my readers by building a sitemap of the data.gov.uk site because the topics it includes are just what people have been asking the US data.gov to provide, namely: meetings, business plans, contracts, forums, blogs, etc.

Then I downloaded a few of their key datasets to see how easy it was to work with and understand them. I downloaded their Data Catalog, COINS, and Performance Data and created a dashboard shown elsewhere.

I thought the introductory explanation and video from their Prime Minister David Cameron (above) was especially good at explaining the benefit intended from data.gov.uk.

What’s data.gov.uk all about?

The Government is releasing public data to help people understand how government works and how policies are made. Some of this data is already available, but data.gov.uk brings it together in one searchable website. Making this data easily available means it will be easier for people to make decisions and suggestions about government policies based on detailed information. Hear more about the Government’s Transparency agenda from the Prime Minister

What’s available?

There are currently over 5,400 datasets available, from all central government departments and a number of other public sector bodies and local authorities.

Is data just public information?

Not really. From data.gov.uk, you can access the raw data driving government forward. This can then be used by people to build useful applications that help society, or investigate how effective policy changes have been over time. Previous on Data.gov limitations – done at Data.gov.uk

What is COINS?

In June 2010, HM Treasury, the principal custodian of financial data for the UK government, released previously restricted information from its Combined Online Information System (COINS). Until then, access to COINS by journalists and members of the public had been very difficult, and COINS itself had been the subject of various Freedom of Information requests. The release of COINS data therefore represented a step change in the Treasury’s willingness to share data openly.

While the release of the COINS data is very significant, it does not by itself make the government’s finances scrutable. COINS is a highly technical information source, requiring detailed knowledge of the encoding schemes used to make sense of it. Moreover, the data files are too large to load into widely available analysis tools such as Microsoft Excel, a common tool-of-choice for many data investigators.

Some enterprising teams have stepped up to the challenge of providing better access to the COINS data, notable among them the Where does my money go? project, and the Guardian datastore.

We believe, however, that more can be done to open up the COINS dataset for exploration and analysis. Linked Open Data is the name of a distributed, global initiative to provide better means to open up datasets, and, crucially, to publish links and connections between data. Each datum in COINS is identified by seven key indices and the metadata and data dictionary are provide on my SemanticCommunity site.

So my goal was to integrate all of this (three data sets and their data dictionaries and metadata) into one dashboard. The dashboard I created is shown elsewhere on my SemanticCommunity site and convinced me that it was very easy to access, use, and understand their Data Catalog, COINS, and Performance Data Sets. This is what we need the US data.gov and other administration open government web sites to be.