Code The City is a civic hacking initiative focused on using tech and (open) data for civic good. We use hack weekends, open data, workshops, and idea generation tools. We run Data Meetups, the Aberdeen Python User Group and the annual Scottish Open Data Unconference
Saturday 6th March, 2021 was World Open Data Day. To mark this international event CTC ran a Wikidata Taster session. The objectives were to introduce attendees to Wikidata and how it works, and give them a few hours to familiarise themselves with how to add items, link items, and add images.
Presentation title screen
The theme of the session (to give it some structure and focus) was the Industrial Heritage of Aberdeen. More specifically the bygone industries of Aberdeen and, more specific still, the many Iron Foundries that once existed. I chose the specific topic as it is still relatively easy to spot the products of the industry on streets and pavements as we walk around the city, photograph those and add them to Wiki Commons, as I have been doing.
We had thirteen people book and eight turn up. After I gave a short presentation on how Wikidata operates we divided ourselves into three groups in breakout rooms. This was all on Zoom, of course, while we were still under lockdown.
The teams of attendees chose a foundry each: Barry, Henry & Cook Limited; Blaikie Brothers, and William McKinnon & Company Ltd. I’d already created an entry for John Duffus and Company in preparation for the event and to use as a model.
I’d also created a Google Sheet with a tab for each of the other thirteen foundries I’d identified (including those selected by the groups). I’d also spent quite a while trying to figure out how to access and search the old business and Post Office Directories for the city which had been digitised for 1824 to 1941. I eventually I built myself a tool, which I shared with the teams, which generated an URL for a specific search term for a certain directory. They used this, as well as other sources, to identify key dates, addresses and name changes of businesses.
By the end of the session our teams had created items for
They had also created items for foundry buildings – linked to Canmore etc, as well as founders. We enhanced these with places of their burial, portraits and images of gravestones. I took further photos which I uploaded to Commons and linked the following Monday. I created two Wikidata queries to show the businesses added, and the founders who created the businesses.
The statistics for the 3 hour session (although some worked into the afternoon and even the next day) are impressive. You can see more detail on the event dashboard.
We received positive feedback from the attendees who have been able to take their first steps towards using Wikidata as a public linked open data for heritage items.
I hope that the attendees will keep working on the iron founders until we have all of these represented on Wikidata. Next we can tackle shipbuilders and the granite industry!
There are thousands of ship wrecks off the coast of Scotland which can be seen on Marine Scotland’s website
In Wikidata the position was quite different with only a few wrecks being logged. The information for the image below was derived from running the following query in Wikidata https://w.wiki/nDt
Day one – sourcing the information of the wrecks.
The project started by research various website to obtain the raw data required. Maps with shipwrecks plotted were found but finding the underlying data source was not so easy.
Once data was found, the next stage was finding out the licensing rights and whether or not the data could be downloaded and legitimately reused. The data found on Canmore’s website indicated that it was provided under an Open Government Licence hence could be uploaded to Wikidata. This is the data source which was then used on day two of the project.
A training session on how to use Wikidata was also required on day one to allow the team to understand how to upload the data to Wikidata and how the identifiers etc worked.
Day two – cleaning and uploaded the data to Wikidata.
Deciding on the identifiers to use in Wikidata was the starting point, then the data had to be cleaned and manipulated. This involved translating Easting and Northings coordinates to latitude and longitude, matching the ship types between the Canmore file and Wikidata, extracting the reference to the ship from Canmore’s URL and general overall common sense review of the data. To aid with this work a Python script was created. It produced a tab separated file with the necessary statements to upload to Wikidata via Quickstatements.
The team members were new to Wikidata and were unable to create batch uploads as they didn’t have 4 days since creating their accounts and 50 manual edits to their credit – a safeguard to stop new accounts creating scripts to do damage.
We asked Ian from Code The City to assist, as he has a long editing history. He continues this blog post.
Next steps
I downloaded the output.txt file and checked if it could be uploaded straight to Quickstatements. It looked like there were minor problems with the text encoding of strings. So I imported the file into Google Docs. There, I ensured that the Label, Description and Canmore links were surrounded in double quotation marks. A quick find and replace did this.
I tested an upload of five or six entries and these all ran smoothly. I then did several hundred. That turned up some errors. I spotted loads of ships with the label “unknown” and every wreck had the same description. I returned to the Python script and tweaked it to concatenate the word “Unknown” with a Canmore ID. This fixed the problem. I also had to create a checking method of seeing if our ship had already been uploaded. I did this by downloading all the matching Canmore IDs for successfully uploaded ships. I then filtered these out before re-creating the output.txt file.
I then generated the bulk of the 24,185 to be uploaded. I noticed a fairly high error rate. This was due to a similar issue to the Unknown-named ships. The output.txt script was trying to upload multiple ships with the same names (e.g. over 50 ships with the name Hope). I solved this in the same manner as with Unknown-named wrecks, concatenating ship names with “Canmore nnnnnn.”
I prepared this even as the bulk upload was running. Filtering out the recently uploaded ships and re-running the creation of the Output.txt file meant that within a few minutes I was able to have the corrective upload ready. Running this a final time resulted in all shipwrecks being added to WIkidata, albeit with some issues to fix. This had taken about a day to run, refine and rerun.
The following day I set out to refine the quality of the data. The names of shipwrecks had been left in sentence case: an initial capital and everything else in lower case. I downloaded a CSV of records we’d created, and changed the Labels to Proper Case. I also took the opportunity to amend the descriptions to reflect the provenance of the records from Canmore in the description of each. I set one browser the task of changing Labels, and another the change to descriptions. This was 24,185 changes each – and took many hours to run. I noticed several hundred failed updates – which appear to just be “The save has failed” messages. I checked those and reran them. Having no means of exporting errors from Quickstatements (that I know of) makes fixing errors more difficult than it should be.
Finally I noticed by chance that a good number of records (estimated at 400) are not shipwrecks at all but wrecks of aircraft. Most, if not all, are prefixed “A/C’ in the label.
I created a batch to remove statements for ships and shipwrecks and to add statements saying that these are instances of crash sites. I also scripted the change to descriptions identifying these as aircraft wrecks rather than ship wrecks.
This query https://w.wiki/pjA now identifies and maps all aircraft wrecks.
The location of all shipwrecks uploaded to Wikidata from Canmore.
Next steps?
I’ve noted the following things that the team could do to enhanced and refine the data further:
Check what other data is available by download or scraping from Canmore (such as date of sinking, depth, dimensions) and add that to the wikidata records
Attempt to reconcile data uploaded from Aberdeen built ships at CTC19 with these wrecks – there may be quite a few to be merged
Finally, in the process of working on the cleaning of this uploaded data I noticed the the data model on Wikidata to support this is not well structured.
This was what I sketched out as I attempted to understand it.
A confusing data model
Before I changed the aircraft wrecks to “crash site” I merged the two items which works with the queries above. But this needs more work.
Should the remains of a crashed aircraft be something other than a crash site? The latter could be cleared of debris and still be the crash site. The term Shipwreck more clearly describes where a wreck is whether buried, on land, or beneath the sea.
Why is a shipwreck a facet of a ship, but a crash site is a subclass of aircraft.
And Disaster Remains seems like the wrong term for what might be a non-disastrous event (say if a ship from the middle ages gently settled into mud over the centuries and was forgotten about – and certainly isn’t a subclass of Conservation Status, anyway.
I’d be happy to work with anyone else on better working out an ontology for this.
One of the Code the City 21 projects was looking at providing Scots translations of Aberdeenshire place names for displaying on an OpenStreetMap map. Part of the outcomes for that project included a list of translated places names and potentially an audio version of name to guide in pronunciation.
I’m a firm believer that Open Data shouldn’t just become “dusty data left on the digital shelf” and to “show don’t tell”. This led me to decide to show just how easy it is to do something with the data created as part of the weekend’s activities and to make use of outcomes from a previous CTC event (Aberdeenshire Settlements on Wikidata and Wikipedia) and thus take that data off the digital shelf.
My plan was to build a simple iOS app, using SwiftUI, that would allow the following:
Listing of place names in English and their Scots translation
View details about a place including its translation, location and photo
Map showing all the places and indicating if a translation exists or not
I used SwiftUI as it is fun (always an important consideration) to play with and quick to get visible results. It also provides the future option to run the app as a Mac desktop app.
Playing along at home
Anyone with a Mac running at least Catalina (macOS 10.15) can install Xcode 12 and run the app on the Simulator. The source code can be found in GitHub.
Getting the source data
Knowing that work had previously been done on populating Wikidata with a list of Aberdeenshire Settlements and providing photos for them, I turned to Wikidata for sourcing the data to use in the app.
# Get list of places in Aberdeenshire, name in English and Scots, single image, lat and long
SELECT ?place (SAMPLE(?place_EN) as ?place_EN) (SAMPLE(?place_SCO) as ?place_SCO) (SAMPLE(?image) as ?image) (SAMPLE(?longitude) as ?longitude) (SAMPLE(?latitude) as ?latitude)
WHERE {
?place wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q486972 .
?place wdt:P131 wd:Q189912 .
?place p:P625 ?coordinate.
?coordinate psv:P625 ?coordinate_node .
?coordinate_node wikibase:geoLongitude ?longitude .
?coordinate_node wikibase:geoLatitude ?latitude .
OPTIONAL { ?place wdt:P18 ?image }.
OPTIONAL { ?place rdfs:label ?place_EN filter (lang(?place_EN) = "en" )}.
OPTIONAL { ?place rdfs:label ?place_SCO filter (lang(?place_SCO) = "sco" )}.
}
GROUP BY ?place
ORDER By ?place_EN
Single image for the place (some places have multiple images so had to be restricted to single image)
Latitude of place
Longitude of place
Just requesting the coordinate for each place resulted in a text string, such as Point(-2.63004 57.5583), which complicated the use later on. Adding the relevant code
to the query to generate latitude and longitude values simplified the data reuse at the next stage.
The results returned by the query were exported as a JSON file that could be dropped straight into the Xcode project.
The App
SwiftUI allows data driven apps to be quickly pulled together. The data powering the app was a collection of Place structures populated with the contents of the JSON exported from Wikidata.
struct Place: Codable, Identifiable {
let place: String
let place_EN: String
let place_SCO: String?
let image: String?
var latitude: String
var longitude: String
// Computed Property
var id: String { return place }
var location: CLLocationCoordinate2D {
CLLocationCoordinate2D(latitude: Double(latitude)!, longitude: Double(longitude)!)
}
}
The app itself was split into three parts: Places list, Map, Settings. The Places list drills down to a Place details view.
List of places in English and their Scots translation if included in the dataDetails screen about a placeMap showing places and indicating if they have Scots translation (yellow) or not (red)
The Settings screen just displays some about information and where the data came from. It acts partially as a placeholder for now with the room to expand as the app evolves.
Next Steps
The app created over the weekend was very much a proof of concept and so has room from many improvements. The list includes:
Caching the location photos on the device
Displaying additional information about the place
Adding search to the list and map
Adding audio pronunciation of name (the related Doric Tiles project did not achieve adding of audio during the CT21 event)
Modified to run on Mac desktop
Ability to requested updated list of places and translations
The final item on the above list, the ability to request an updated list of places, in theory is straight forward. All that would be required is to send the query to the Wikidata Query Service and process the results within the app. The problem is that the query takes a long time to run (nearly 45 seconds) and there may be timeout issues before the results arrive.
A guest post by Karen Jewell, a Data Scientist who attended SODU2020.
I went into the weekend of SODU, headset and coffee at the ready, thinking that as SODU was both my first experience of an unconference and of Open Data, I wouldn’t be able to participate much but that I could take the opportunity to learn from the brighter and more informed voices around me. Well, it turns out I was quite wrong about my involvement with Open Data.
In the networking sessions of the first day, I introduced myself as someone who didn’t work at all with Open Data, had no experience of it and was here to learn about it. Yet as the event carried on through the day, many discussions and concepts seemed familiar to me and in the afternoon of the first day I had that “ah-hah!” moment. I realised it wasn’t true that I did not work with Open Data, I did, and actually had done so quite a bit in the last 12 months. I just had not realised that is what it was called.
Open Data is data which is not owned or controlled, and is free for use and distribution. Having only just completed my studies in a MSc Data Science at the Robert Gordon University 3 weeks prior, free data was pretty critical to my work as a student. Not only was I able to practice concepts using freely available datasets, 3 of my 8 taught modules required me to source my own dataset for that module’s assessment. To rephrase that, I needed Open Data to complete my degree. Data Scientists are aware of Kaggle, the UCI ML repository, and a quick online search for Scotland’s data will return the Scottish Government’s statistics portal. We see these sources as free data we can practice on, but we may not have recognised it as Open Data, I certainly didn’t until SODU took my blinkers off.
Coming out of SODU, I started to wonder how many other people were in the same metaphorical boat. Were they not answering the call for involvement because they did not realise the availability of Open Data affected them too? To test the idea, I set up a non-scientific survey on Instagram and asked my peers the question “Do you know what Open Data is?” with a simple “Yes/No” response. Of the 22 persons who responded, 3 said Yes (14%) and 19 said No (86%). In a perfect world, I would have also had a follow-up question asking if they had used information from a list of known Open Data sources to confirm the theory, but we will have to do without for now.
Quick Poll
Yet in the age of Covid-19 where everyone is quite capable of quoting a statistic or method in every online argument for and against, how many of us haven’t realised we are benefiting from the availability of Open Data when we quote new case counts, % positive tests, and infection rates in our conversations on a daily basis?
I attended SODU to learn about Open Data, and I learnt I’d actually been using it all along. Several prominent themes discussed at SODU included the need for a community of practitioners, having a central point of access, and having evidence of the benefits of supporting Open Data. The question that bugs me now is, how do we know who our practitioners and where our success stories are, if they can’t even recognise themselves? Maybe, there is an opportunity to do some work here?
“Hear me calling, hear me calling loud, If you don’t come soon, I’ll be wearing a shroud.” – Ten Years After (1969)
Introduction
Today marks the tenth anniversary of my involvement with Open Data in Scotland. As I wrote here, back in 2009-2010 I’d been following the work that Chris Taggart and others were doing with open data, and was inspired by them to create what I now believe to have been the first open data published in the public sector in Scotland.
This piece is a reflection of my own views. These views may be the same as those held by colleagues at Code The City or indeed on the civic side of the Open Government Partnership. I’ve not specifically asked other individuals in either group.
While my involvement in, and championing of, open data in Scotland is now a decade long, my enthusiasm for the subject and in the the social and economic benefits it can deliver, is undiminished by my leaving the public sector in 2017 after thirty four years. In fact the opposite is true: the more I am involved in the OD movement, and study what is being achieved beyond Scotland’s narrow borders, the more I am convinced that we are a country intent on squandering a rich opportunity, regardless of our politicians’ public pronouncements.
But the journey has not been easy. primarily due to a lack of direction from Scottish Government and little commitment, resource or engagement at all levels of public service. A friend who reviewed this blog post suggested that I should replace the picture of a birthday cake (above) with one of a naked human back bearing bleeding scars from the our battles. He’s right – it is STILL a battle ten years on.
It is not as if the position in Scotland is getting better. We are moving at a glacial pace. The gap between Scotland and other countries in this regard is widening. I gave a talk earlier this year in which I showed assessments of Scotland, Romania and Kenya’s performance in Open Government (source: https://www.opengovpartnership.org/campaigns/global-report/ Vol 2) and asked the audience to identify which was Scotland.
Extracts from Vol2 to of the Open Gov Partnership report
In February 2020 the European Data Portal published a report – The Economic Impact of Open Data – which sets out a clear economic case for open data. That paper looks at 15 previous studies between 1999 and 2020 which have examined at the market size of open data at national and international levels, measured in terms of GDP of each study’s geographical area.
Taking the average and median values from those reports (1.33% and 1.19% respectively) and an estimated GDP for Scotland (2018) of £170.4bn we can see that the missed opportunity for Scotland is of the order of £2.027bn to £2.266bn per annum. What is the actual value of the local market created by Scottish-created open data? if pushed for a figure I would estimate that it is currently worth a few hundred thousand pounds per annum, and no more. Quite a gap!
Meantime we have the usual suspect of consultants whispering sweetly in the ears of ministers, senior civil servants and council bosses that we should be monetising data, creating markets, selling it. There will be no mention, I suspect of the heavily-subsidised, private sector led, yet failed Copenhagen Data Exchange, I suspect. (Maybe they can make a few bob back selling the domain name! )
You can buy the failed CityDataExchange.com for just $5195
While this commercial approach to data may plug small gaps in annual funding for Scotland, and line the pockets of some big companies in the process, it won’t deliver the financial benefits at a national level of anything like the figures suggested by that EU Data Portal report but it will, in the process, actively hamper innovation and inhibit societal benefits.
I hear lots of institutions saying “we need to sell data” or “we need to sell access rights to these photos” or similar. Yet, in so many cases, the operation of the mechanisms of control; the staffing, administration, payment processing etc. far outstrips any generated income. When I challenged ex colleagues in local government about this behaviour their response was “but our managers want to see an income line” to which we could add “no matter how much it is costing us.” And this tweet from The Ferret on Tuesday of this week is another excellent example of this!
I have also heard lots of political proclamations of “open and transparent” government in Scotland since 2014. Yet most of the evidence points in exactly the opposite direction. Don’t forget, when Covid 19 struck, Scotland’s government was reportedly the only political administration apart from Bolsonaro’s far right one in Brazil to use the opportunity to limit Freedom of Information.
Openness, really?
It is clear that there is little or no commitment to open data in any meaningful way at a Scottish Government level, in local authorities, or among national agencies. This is not to say that there aren’t civil servants who are doing their best, often fighting against political or senior administration’s actions. Public declarations are rarely matched by delivery of anything of substance and conversations with people in those agencies (of which I have had many) paints a grim picture of political masters saying one thing and doing another, of senior management not backing up public statements of intent with the necessary resource commitment and, on more than occasion, suggestions of bad actors actually going against what is official policy.
I mention below that I joined the Open Government Partnership late in 2019. Initially I was enthusiastic about what we might achieve. While there are civil servants working dedicatedly on open government who want to make it work, I am unconvinced about political commitment to it. We really need to get some positive and practical demonstration that Scottish Government are behind us – otherwise I and the other civil society representatives are just assisting in an open-washing exercise.
In my view (and that of others) the press in Scotland does not provide adequate scrutiny and challenge of government. We have a remarkably ineffective political opposition. We also have a network of agencies and quangos which are reliant on the Scottish Government for funding who are unwilling to push back. All of this gives the political side a free pass to spout encouraging words of “open and transparent” yet do the minimum at all times.
We may have an existing Open Data Strategy for Scotland (2015) stating that Scotland’s data is “open by default”, yet my 2019 calculation was that over 95% of the data that could and should be open was still locked up. And there is little movement on fixing that.
We have many examples of agencies doing one thing and saying another, such as Scottish Enterprise extolling the virtues of Open Data yet producing none. Its one API has been broken for many months, I am told.
My good friends at The Data Lab do amazing work on funding MSc and Phd places, and providing funding for industrial research in the application of data science. Their mission is “to help Scotland maximise value from data …” yet they currently offer no guidance on open data, no targeted programme of support, no championing of open data at all, despite the widely-accepted economic advantages which it can deliver. There is the potential for The Data Lab to lead on how Scotland makes the most of open data and to guide government thinking on this!
All of this is not to pick on specific organisations, or hard working and dedicated employees within them. But it does highlight systemic failures in Scotland from the top of government downwards.
Fixing this is an enormous task: one which can only be done by the development of a fresh strategy for open data in Scotland, which is mandated for all public sector bodies, is funded as an investment (recognising the economic potential), and which is rigorously monitored and enforced.
I could go on…. but let’s look at this year’s survey.
In February 2019 I conducted a survey of the state of open data in Scotland. It didn’t paint an encouraging picture. The data behind that survey has been preserved here. A year on, I started thinking about repeating the review.
In the intervening year I’d been involved in quite a bit activity around open data. I had
joined the civic side of the Open Government group for Scotland and was asked to lead for the next iteration of the plan on Commitment Three (sharing information and data) ,
joined the steering group of Stirling University’s research project, Data Commons Scotland,
trained as a trainer for Wikimedia UK, delivering training in Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wiki Commons, and running multiple sessions for Code The City with a focus on Wikidata,
created an open Slack Group for the open data community in Scotland to engage with one another,
created an Open Data Scotland twitter account which has gained almost 500 followers, and
In restarting this year’s review of open data publishing in Scotland my aims were to see what had changed in the intervening 12 months and to increase the coverage of the survey: going broader and deeper and developing an even more accurate picture. That work spilled into March at which point Covid-19 struck. During lockdown I was distracted by various pieces of work. It wasn’t until August, and with a growing sense of the imminence of this 10-year anniversary, that I was galvanised to finish that review.
I am conscious that the methodology employed here is not the cleverest – one person counting only the numbers of datasets produced. This is something I return to later.
The picture in 2020
I broke the review down into sectoral groupings to make it more managable to conduct. By sticking to that I hope to make this overview more readable. The updated Git Hub repo in which I noted my findings is available publicly, and I encourage anyone who spots errors or omissions to make a pull request to correct them. Each heading below has a link to the Github page for the research.
Overall there is little significant positive change. This is one factor which gives rise to concerns about government’s commitment to openness generally and open data specifically; and to a growing cynicism in the civic community about where we go from here.
I reviewed this area in February 2020 and rechecked it in August. Sadly there has been no significant change in the publication of open data by local government in the eighteen months since I last reviewed this. More than a third of councils (13 out of a total of 32) still make no open data provision.
While the big gain is that Renrewshire Council have launched a new data portal with over fifty datasets, most councils have shown little or no change.
Sadly the Highland Council portal, procured as part of the Scottish Cities Alliance’s Data Cluster programme at £10,000’s cost, has vanished. I dont think it ever saw a dataset being added to it. Searching Highland Council’s website for open data finds nothing.
While big numbers of data sets don’t mean much by themselves, the City of Edinburgh Council has a mighty 236 datasets. Brilliant! BUT … none of them are remotely current. The last update to any of them was September 2019. Over 90% of them haven’t been updated since 2016 or earlier.
Similarly Glasgow, which has 95 datasets listed have a portal which is repeatedly offline for days at a time. A portal which won’t load is useless.
Dundee, Perth and Stirling continue to do well. Their offerings are growing and they demonstrate commitment to the long-haul.
Aberdeen launched a portal, more than three years in the planning, populated it with 16 datasets and immediately let their open data officer leave at the end of a short-term contract. Some of their datasets are interesting and useful – but there was no consultation with the local data community about what they would find useful, or deliver benefits locally; all despite multiple invitations from me to interact with that community at the local data meet-ups which I was running in the city.
It was hoped that the programme under the Scottish Cities alliance would yield uniform datasets, prioritised across all seven Scottish Cities, but there is no sign of that happening, sadly. So what you find on all portals or platforms is pretty much a pot-luck draw.
Where common standards exist – such as the 360 Giving standard for the publication of support for charities – organisations should be universally adopting these. Yet this is only used by two of 32 authorities, all of whom have grant-making services. Surely, during a pandemic especially, it would be advantageous to funders and recipients to know who is funding which body to deliver what project?
Councils – Open Government Licence and RPSI
This is a slight aside from the publication of open data, but an important one. If the Scottish Authorities were to adopt an OGL approach to the publication of data and information on their website (as both the Scottish Government’s core site and the Information Commissioner for Scotland do) then we would be able to at least reuse data obtained from those sites. This is not a replacement for publishing proper open data but it would be a tiny step forward.
The table below (source and review data here) shows the current permissions to reuse the content of Scottish Local Authorities’ websites. Many are lacking in clarity, have messy wording, are vague or misunderstand terminologies. They also, in the main, ignore legislation on fair re-use.
Table of local authority adoption of PGL and RPSI
Open Government Licence
The Scottish Government’s own site is excellent and clear: permitting all content except logos to be be reused under the Open Government Licence. This is not true for local authorities. At present only Falkirk and Orkney Councils – two of the smaller ones – allow, and promote OGL re-use of content. There is no good reason why all of the public sector, including local government, should not be compelled to adopt the terms of OGL.
Re-use of Public Sector Information (RPSI) Regulations
Since 2015 the public sector has been obliged by the RPSI Regulations to permit reasonable reuse of information held by local authorities. So, even if Scottish LAs have not yet adopted OGL for all website content, they should have been making it clear for the last five years how a citizen can re-use their data and information from their website.
In my latest trawl through the T&Cs and Copyright Statements of 32 Scottish Local Authorities, I found only 7 referencing RPSI rights there, with 25 not doing so (see the full table above). I am fairly sure that these authorities are breaking the legal obligation on public bodies to provide that information.
Finally, given the presence of COSLA on the Open Government Scotland steering group, the situation with no open data; poor, missing or outdated data; and OGL and PRSI issues needs to be raised there and some reassurance sought that they will work with their member organisations to fix these issues.
The NHS Scotland Open Data platform continues to be developed as a very useful resource. The number of datasets there has more than doubled since last year (from 26 to 73).
None of the fourteen Health Boards publish their own open data beyond what is on the NHS Scotland portal.
Only one of the thirty Health and Social Care Partnerships (HSCPs) publish anything resembling open data: Angus HSCP.
COVID-19 and open data
While we are on health, I’ve wrote (here and here) early in the pandemic about the need for open data to help the better public understanding of the situation, and stimulate innovative responses to the crisis. The statistics team at Scottish Government responded well to this and we’ve started to develop a good relationship. I’ve not followed that up with a retrospective about what did happen. Perhaps I will in time.
It was clear that the need for open data in CV19 situation caught government and health sector napping. The response was slower than it should have been and patchy, and there are still gaps. People find it difficult to locate data when it is on muliple platforms, spread across Scots Govt, Health and NRS. That is, in a microcosm, one of the real challenges of OD in Scotland.
With an open Slack group for Open Data Scotland there is a direct channel that data providers could use to engage the open data community on their plans and proposals. They could also to sound out what data analysts and dataviz specialists would find useful. That opportunity was not taken during the Covid crisis, and while I was OK in the short term with being used as a human conduit to that group, it was neither efficient nor sustainable. My hope is that post SODU 2020, and as the next iteration of the Open Gov Scotland plan comes together we will see better, more frequent, direct engagement with the data community on the outside of Government, and a more porous border altogether.
There is no significant change across the sector in the past 18 months. The vast majority of institutions make no provision of open data. Some have vague plans, many of them historic – going back four years or more – and not acted on.
Lumping Universities and Colleges together, one might expect at a minimum properly structured and licensed open data from every institution on :
courses
modules
events
performance (perhaps some of this is on HESA and SFC sites?)
physical assets
environmental performance
KPI targets and achievements etc.
Of course, there is none of that.
Universities and colleges
I reviewed open data provision of Universities and Colleges around 17 February 2020. I revisited this on 11 August 2020, making minor changes to the numbers of data sets found.
While five of fifteen universities are publishing increasing amounts of data in relation to research projects, most of which are on a CC-0 or other open basis, there continues to be a very limited amount of real operational open data across the sector with loads of promises and statements of intent, some going back several years.
The Higher Education Statistics Agency publishes a range of potentially useful-looking Open Data under a CC-BY-4.0 licence. This is data about insitutions, course, students etc – and not data published by the institutions themselves. But I could identify none of that. Overall, this was very disappointing.
Further, while there are 20 FE colleges. None produces anything that might be classed as open data. A few have anything beyond vague statement of intent. Perhaps City of Glasgow College not only comes closest, but does link to some sources of info and data.
The Crighton Observatory
While doing all of this, I was reminded of the Crighton Institute’s Regional Observatory which was announced to loud fanfares in 2013 and appears to have quietly been shut down in 2017. Two of the team involved say in their Linked In profiles that they left at the end of the project. Even the domain name to which articles point is now up for grabs (Feb 2020).
It now appears (Aug 2020) that the total initial budget for the project was >£1.1m. Given that the purpose of the observatory was to amass a great deal of open data, I have also attempted to find out where the data is that it collected and where the knowledge and learning arising from the project has been published for posterity? I can’t locate it. This FOI request may help. The big question: what benefits did the £1.1m+ deliver?
In February 2019 I found that The Scottish Parliament had released 121 data sets. This covers motions, petitions, Bills, petitions and other procedural data, and is very interesting. This year we find that they have still 121 data sets, so, there are no new data sources.
In fact that number is misleading. In February 2020 I discovered that while 75 of these have been updated with new data, the remaining 46 (marked BETA) no longer work. As of August 2020 this is still the case. Why not fix them, or at worst clear them out to simplfy the finadbility of working data?
Some of these BETA datasets should contain potentially more interesting / useful data e.g. Register of Members Interests but just don’t work. Returning: [“{message: ‘Data is presently unavailable’}”]
I didn’t note the availability of APIs last year, but there are 186 API calls available. Many of these are year-specific. I tested half a dozen and about a third of those returned error messages. I suspect some of these align with the non-functioning historic BETAs.
Sadly the issues raised a year ago about the lack of clarity of the licensing of the data is unchanged. To find the licence, you have to go to Notes > Policy on Use of SPCB Copyright Material. Following the first link there (to a PDF) you see that you have to add “Contains information licenced under the Scottish Parliament Copyright Licence.” to anything you make with it, which is OK. But if you go to the second link “Scottish Parliament Copyright Licence” (another PDF) the wording (slightly) contradicts that obligation. It then has a chunk about OGL but says, “This Scottish Parliament Licence is aligned with OGLv3.0” whatever that means. Why not just license all of the data under OGL? I can’t see what they are trying to do.
Trying to work out the business units within the structure of Scottish Government is a significant challenge in itself. Attempting to then establish which have published open data, and what those data sets are, and how they are licensed, is almost an impossible task. If my checking, and arithmetic are right, then of 147 discrete business units, only 27 have published any open data and 120 have published none.
So we can say with some confidence that the issue with findability of data raised in Feb 2019 is unchanged, there being no central portal for open data in the Scottish public sector or even for Scottish Government. Searching the main Scottish Government website for open data yields 633 results, none of which are links to data on the first four screenfuls. I didn’t go deeper than that.
The Scottish Government’s Statistics Team have a very good portal with 295 Data Sets from multiple organisational-providers. This is up by 46 datasets on last year and includes a two new organisations: The Care Inspectorate and Registers of Scotland. The latter, so far (Aug 2020), has no datasets on the portal.
There are some interesting new entrants into the list of those parts of Scottish Government publishing data such as David MacBrayne Limited which is, I believe, wholly owned by SG and is the parent, or operator of Calmac Ferries Limited. On 1st March 2020 they released a new data platform to get data about their 29 ferry routes. This is very welcome. After choosing the dates, routes and traffic types you can download a CSV of results. While their intent appears to be to make it Open Data, the website is copyright and there is no specific licensing of the data. This is easily fixable.
It is also interesting to contrast Transport Scotland with work going on in England. Transport Scotland’s publication scheme says of open data “Open data made available by the authority as described by the Scottish Government’s Open Data Strategy and Resource Pack, available under an open licence. We comply with the guidance above when publishing data and other information to our website. Details of publications and statistics can be found in the body of this document or on the Publications section of our website.” I searched both without success for any OD. Why not say “we don’t publish any Open Data”? Compare this complete absence of open data with even the single project Open Bus Data for England. Read the story here. Scotland is yet again so far behind!
Summary
In the review of data I’ve shown that little has changed in 18 months. Very few branches of government are publishing open data at all. The landscape is littered with outdated and forgotten statements of good intent which are not acted on; broken links; portals that vanish or don’t work; out of date data; yawning gaps in publication and so on.
The claim of “Open By Default” in the current (2015) Open Data Strategy is misleading and mostly ignored with consequence. The First Minister may frequently repeat the mantra of “Open and Transparent” when speaking or questioned by journalists, but it is easily demonstrable that the administration frequently act in the directly opposite way to that.
The recent situations with Covid-19 and the SQA exams results show Scotland would have found itself in a much better place this year with a mature and well-developed approach to open data: an approach one might have reasonably expected after five full years of “open by default”.
The social and economic arguments for open data are indisputable. These have been accepted by most other governments of the developed world. Importantly, they have also been taken up and acted on by developing nations who have in many cases overtaken Scotland in their delivery of their Open Government plans.
The work I have done in 2019 and in this review is not a sustainable one – i.e. one single volunteer monitoring the activity of every branch and level of government in Scotland. And the methodology is limited to what is achievable by an individual.
A country which was serious about Open Data would have targets and measures, monitoring and open reporting of progress.
It wouldn’t just count datasets published. It would be looking at engagement, the usefulness of data and its integration into education.
It would fund innovation: specifically in the use of open data; in the creation of tools; in developing services to both support government in creating data pipelines, and in helping citizens in data use.
It would co-develop and mandate the use of data standards across the public sector.
It would develop and share canonical lists of ‘things’ with unique identifiers allowing data sets to be integrated.
It would adopt the concept of data as infrastructure on which new products, services, apps, and insights could be built.
I really want Scotland to make the most of the opportunities afforded by Open Data. I wouldn’t have spent ten years at this if I didn’t believe in the potential this offers; nor if I didn’t have the evidence to show that this can be done. I wouldn’t be giving up my time year-on-year researching this, giving talks, organising groups and creating opportunities for engagement.
What is fundamentally lacking here is some honesty from Scottish Government ministers instead of their pretence of support for open data.
Scotland is B, in the centre. Kenya is A, and Romania C.
I could have chosen Mexico, Honduras, Paraguay, Uruguay – or others. All are doing better than Scotland.
Code The City 
