[wdmmg-discuss] Still no joy with HMRC

Mon Apr 26 15:48:14 UTC 2010

My reply is at the bottom of the email.

On Wed, 14 Apr 2010, Donovan Hide wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I just got off of the phone with Vilosh Brito, the CEO of Information Edge,
> the company that created Terasolve and Camelot/Prove, which is the platform
> that COINS sits on.
>
> He was very helpful and agreed to forward on an email from me to an official
> at the Treasury, to see if it would be ok for him and Information Edge to
> assist with the design of an extract of the data which meets all the caveats
> that have been specified in the previously denied FOI requests.
>
> Apparently, the relevant people at the Treasury are bored of spending all
> their time with lawyers! So it makes a lot of sense, if permission is given,
> for the designers of the system to build a simple query (a rough quote of
> 1/2 day's work) that excludes all the sensitive data.
>
> This might include:
> - public corporations
> - military spending
> - secret service spending
> - future forecast data
> - "what if" modelling data
> - data that is known to be incorrect
>
> Information Edge had issues with the schema of the database being released,
> because that represents their intellectual property. That seems fair enough
> really, seeing as they have designed a system that lets you run a country!!!
> What this means is that some of the dimensions could well be stripped away.
> But as long as the fact data, ie. the transactions, are kept, then it will
> still be useful.
>
> Another issue was that the data would almost definitely not reconcile with
> the national accounts without that IP being present. I think this explains
> the Treasury's belief that people would complain as a result of the data
> being released. I think clear notices of this fact when the data is
> presented would mitigate that risk.
>
> The data could potentially be extracted as an XMLA file, but Information
> Edge might have a better suggestion.
>
> So, I've got to describe to Vilosh, in detail how he can help us, so that he
> can get permission to do so. Does anyone have anything they want me to
> include?

This is excellent Donnovan, thank you for this great help.

If it's not too late, I'd like to ask Vilosh how we can best ask for:

- all spending associated with the current programme objects.
- a small number, let's say 23, complete COINS records.