[wdmmg-discuss] Where are the Government Departments?

[K Corrick]

I think Hadley Beeman is working on this area too and working on joining the
dots, I've cc'd her in.

Best wishes,

Kathryn

____________________________



On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 2:40 AM, Alistair Turnbull <
apt1002 at goose.minworks.co.uk> wrote:

> Here are two poorly researched ideas about Government departments:
>
> 1. I spoke to Chris Taggart about coding up departments when I met him at
> OK Con. He seems to have a pretty clear picture of the prior work in this
> area, and all its deficiencies. More importantly, he said he has invented a
> coding system for his own use, and he encouraged us to use it. I never
> followed this up in the end, but it might be an avenue worth exploring.
>
> 2. Last time I checked, we were quite close to having a decent list of all
> the Programme Objects. These are organised into a hierarchy. The next
> coursest level is Programme Object Groups, which appear in the CRA. After
> that there is at least one more level, and then the top level is the
> department that allocated the code, as I understand it. If so, then you
> might be able to get a usable de facto coding system out of it. Compared to
> other coding systems, it would have the advantage that any department that
> allocates PO codes will have an incentive to maintain it. I bet it therefore
> somehow copes with the historical awkwardness you describe below.
>
> I could be completely wrong. :-)
>
>        Alistair
>
>
> On Sat, 14 Aug 2010, William Waites wrote:
>
>  I'm having a look at making an SDMX/RDF representation
>> of the Country and Regional Analysis, one of the main datasets
>> behind the Where Does My Money Go project.
>>
>> One of the dimensions is government department, and it would
>> be nice to be able to link to the canonical concept scheme. I
>> believe there was some work going on on this back in the spring
>> and I wonder what has become of it.
>>
>> Looking at the most recent dump in [0] there seem to be a
>> number of problems:
>>
>>  * There is no schema. There is a suggestion of a concept
>>     scheme but [1] gives a 404
>>  * none of the URIs dereference, it appears not to have been
>>     loaded into the Talis endpoints
>>  * The data doesn't include historical (even recent) departments.
>>     For example, the Department for Innovation, Universities and
>>     Skills was merged into the Department for Business, Innovation
>>     and Skills relatively recently and appears in Treasury
>>     documents covering the period of interest.
>>  * Related to the last, there is no mention of a creation and
>>     winding up date for the departments, nor any notion of
>>     predecessors and successors.
>>  * Currently extant departments, for example HM Revenue and
>>     Customs do not exist (thought that one is mentioned in the
>>     comment for the attorney general).
>>
>> There was a bunch of very good work done back in January
>> and February by Stuart Williams that addressed most of these
>> problems. I can see the data on the Basecamp. The dumps on
>> source.data.gov.uk seem to have removed a lot of information.
>> There was a schema, date and lineage linkage, all of that.
>>
>> Stuart's that data wasn't necessarily perfect, it collated information
>> from a large number of sources. But was is far better than what we
>> have which is more or less nothing. Errors can be corrected but
>> they'll be much more easily discovered if the information is open
>> to inspection and use.
>>
>> It's an iterative process, even for the government. In this particular
>> case, we discovered that there is actually no centrally held canonical
>> list of public bodies, this is one of the reasons that Stuart's work
>> was so difficult and valuable. Simply admitting this and putting
>> a caveat that for this reason the data may contain errors and is
>> subject to revision would be a lot better than waiting until it is
>> perfect to publish the data.
>>
>> To practical questions: can I use this unpublished data? Can I
>> publish it and make it available in my SPARQL endpoints
>> which are obviously not run by *.gov.uk?
>>
>> [0] http://source.data.gov.uk/data/reference/ministerial-departments/
>> [1] http://reference.data.gov.uk/def/public-body/Department
>>
>> --
>> William Waites <wwaites at gmail.com>
>> Mob: +44 789 798 9965
>> Fax: +44 131 464 4948
>>
>>
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>>
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