The Greater London Authority (GLA) has begun the procurement process for support in developing a new data sharing platform.
It is aiming to provide a central register of the city’s key datasets, with the aim of making them more easily discoverable, rather than a single data lake.
The move comes two years after the GLA’s chief digital officer Theo Blackwell publicly outlined the ambition to develop a new version of the London Datastore, describing the platform as a “library record or index card of where the data is held”.
According to the market notice, the London Datastore is now being used to meet needs outside of its original scope and requires an upgrade with scope for iteration in the future.
The GLA wants to develop it to support private data sharing, the provision of big data from sources such as sensor networks, and the provision of APIs.
Discovery to MVP
The notice says a high level discovery exercise took place last year and there are now plans to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) within 12 months.
“This will deliver lots of functionality in a single release to allow users to switch over to the new platform from the current London DataStore (which is procured as software-as-a-service and will continue to run in parallel),” it says.
“In addition to reproducing existing functionality, we will need to meet higher security standards, deliver larger data sets via API, develop the schema for richer metadata, allow more interactive content on data pages and ensure searches look for results across page content, blogs, metadata and data.”
Beyond the development to the MVP, further phases will take on more complex challenges such as integrating a single sign-on, supporting digital-first publication and creating a configurable landing page for users.
The procurement is aimed at recruiting private sector support for the GLA’s City Intelligence Unit on the project and forecasts a spend of £400,000 on the phase.
