[wdmmg-discuss] Still no joy with HMRC

Mon Apr 26 19:05:20 UTC 2010

Reminds me.  I need help to draft my appeal to my FOI request for 23
records.  The answer they gave was "we don't know what you mean by 'a
record'".

Julian.

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 4:48 PM, Lisa Evans <lisa.evans at okfn.org> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>
>
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