1. Scottish Government Data How can we make it really useful? Peter Winstanley LHD-12 Boston, MA. 2012-11-12

2. We publish loads of data!! Agriculture, Fisheries and Rural Business, Enterprise and Energy Children and Young People Crime and Justice Economy Environment Health and Community Care Housing and Regeneration Labour Market Lifelong Learning Local Government Finance Planning Population and Migration School Education Social and Welfare Tourism and Culture Transport and Travel

3. …but not in easily reusable formats

4. …spreadsheets with formats & text

5. PDFs….so let’s find the raw data…

6. …with difficulty…. Users of Firefox or Chrome may also experience issues with the SCROL Analyser service. These issues can be resolved by switching to another browser.

7. …but with success in sight… Download

8. Reach for BeautifulSoup… it’s HTML 

9. And when I do find CSV …

10. .. it is interspersed with text  All Persons Males Females

11. It is not all this bad ….

12. XML & CSV download of all the data http://www.sns.gov.uk

13. … even Linked Data!! http://cofog01.data.scotland.gov.uk/datasets

14. We are dedicated to publishing data… So: Given that there is no magic wand, what are the most effective things we can do to make the data more re-usable?

15. Thoughts … Do we….. Publish terminologies (data dictionaries)? Publish URI sets for ‘things’ -- real-world things and concepts? Focus on a few datasets and make them perfect? [what is perfect?]

16. I am looking for… Recommendations Exemplars Collaborations peter.winstanley@scotland.gsi.gov.uk