Next we will be working on the European Quality of Life survey and then finally we will be opening up a survey from the UK Department of Culture, Media & Sport called “Taking Part” administered by TNS-BRB, which regularly surveys people about the social activities in which they take part outside of work or school.
What’s interesting about these datasets is that together they build up a patchwork quilt of information across Europe about how people feel. As a team we’re really keen on mashups of open lebanon rcs data datasets with other data and we’ve been seeking to discover who else is publishing data, mainly open data, so that we can build some marketing tools and tutorials for developers later this summer.
Lessons learned
One of the biggest lessons learned is that data quality is really important. in it’s infancy. In fact the ODI (Open Data Institute) recently had it’s second annual conference in London. This whole industry is new.
The definition of open data from the Open Knowledge Foundation is:
“Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness).”
When you look at open datasets they vary massively in quality. Also accessibility is an issue. Many are a simple spreadsheet or a file you can download. That isn’t much use for an army of developers who want to access this data programmatically so we’re building our open data into an API using the UK Data Service Infrastructure. We’ve learned a lot about this process from designing other Open Data APIs, most notably LMI for All. However, there were still a few things we’ve learned this time around.