The Greater London Authority (GLA) is now testing the new Data for London Library and planning for a full scale release early in the new year.
Head of the programme Martine Wauben outlined progress at UKAuthority’s AI and Data4Good conference last week, saying the new resource will help local authorities and other bodies obtain data that can help provide practical solutions to problems.
The Data for London Library is being developed to provide more advanced functions than the existing London Datastore, the open data portal that has been in use since 2010. It will make it possible to search for datasets held by public authorities and other bodies in one place.
Wauben said the plan is to release the resource in November, adding data from two boroughs (currently unnamed) and the Nomis service to that already available on the London Datastore.
The programme team is currently working with data owners across London and with some central government bodies and the private sector to begin adding more catalogues, and is planning for a wider release in January 2025.
Making it helpful
“When it comes to January, we will have the sort of coverage of London that will make this helpful to an analyst thinking about solving a problem for London,” Wauben said.
She added: “London has a history of open data and a lot of organisations publishing open data, but that’s already a pain to find,” Wauben said. “Even just Googling for where it is is painful and we want to make that easier.
“But we also want to start making public some of the closed data, private datasets that boroughs have that they can’t publish openly but are willing to share for the right projects.
“So the way the library works is that we are not moving the data itself – we absolutely don’t want another copy of it – but keep the data where it is. But we do want the metadata so we can show people that it exists.”
Supporting complex data sharing
The next steps will involve sharing access management for a fully federated system. This could be used to support complex data sharing arrangements, secure personal data sharing and the operation of the internet of things.
“Having the plug-ins to the metadata catalogues will allow us to assess where that access is feasible,” she said. “Then we’ll work on data curation, then public facing dashboards.”
