Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Data.gov.uk is expected to launch in beta form next month, according to a report from the BBC. The project to deliver linked data about U.K. schools, crime, health and other information collected by the government is led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt (pictured) at the University of Southampton.

“It’s following the [Obama administration] data.gov idea but we’re making it available as linked data,” said Shadboldt in a recent discussion with SemanticWeb.com. “That will be a significant amount of data in semantic web format.” And, “as you start to make more of this public sector information available there are all sorts of opportunities for commercial exploitation or to generate social or economic value.” Lest privacy advocates worry about those potential outcomes, the project is geared to making only anonymous data public.

In order for the web site to achieve its goals, “government must routinely publish a lot of the data it collects,” Shadboldt noted. The project has the backing of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who appointed Berners-Lee as an advisor to the Cabinet Office to help the government begin opening up its data. But still it has required its share of politicking “to get the right technology adoption, skill sets and software sets propagated through the government, and to get the data from government agencies.”

Speaking recently as the keynoter at an RSA/Intellect symposium, Minister for Digital Britain Stephen Timms said that HMG (Her Majesty’s Government) supports using the Internet to make non-personal public data as widely available as possible. “We are supporting Sir Tim in a major new project, aiming to create a single online point of contact for government data, and to extend access to data from the wider public sector. We want this project for ‘Making Public Data Public’ to put UK businesses and other organizations at the forefront of the new semantic web, and to be a platform for developing new technologies and new services,” according to an excerpt from his speech posted on the U.K. Cabinet Office’s Digital Engagement Blog.

Open data developers have been able to sign up to get a preview of the public data website. According to a blog published last month by Leigh Dodds, platform program manager at semantic web vendor Talis, the U.K. data site includes a directory of existing datasets plus a growing number of datasets that have been converted to RDF and which will shortly be available as Linked Data. The data, he wrote, is being stored in the Talis Platform providing developers with access to SPARQL endpoints as a means to query the data, and plans call for also including search and other access mechanisms.

Reportedly the data store that is supported by Talis can scale to 100 billion triples and is hosted on Amazon EC2. The site is powered by Drupal, with packages catalogued and hosted by CKAN. (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network), a registry of open data and content packages that makes it easy to find, share and reuse open content and data, especially in ways that are machine automatable.