Information Management, Standards and Data Quality:

PSI asset registers

Brian Green

ePSIplus Analystfunded by eContentPlus

Welcome and introduction (Brian Green, ePSIplus)

Information Asset Registries: the Latvian solution (Toms Celmillers, Consultant, State Information Systems Unit) Information Asset Registries: a view from local government (Mary Rowlatt, Essex County Council UK) PSI Navigator project  Public - private collaboration in the compilation of asset registers (Anthony Black, Intelligent Addressing)

The Market for PSI (Adrian Norman, PSIphon) Discussion and recommendations

Directive 2003/98/EC on the Re-use of Public Sector Information (Nov 2003)• Procedures to deal with requests for re-use• Availability of documents for re-use• Upper limit for charging (if charges are made).• Transparency of conditions applicable to re-use, charges etc.• Avoidance of discrimination between market players• Avoidance of cross-subsidies between the public part and the

commercial part of public sector bodies that re-use the information;• Prohibition of exclusive arrangements, (with an exception if in the

public interest)• Availability of standard, on-line licences • Practical tools that make it easier to find the material available

for re-use; this could be lists of information assets or portal sites

ePSIplus

• ePSIPlus Thematic Network• Funded under the eContentplus programme of

EC to support the implementation of the European Directive on PSI Re-use

• Covers all Member (EU, EEA, EFTA) and candidate states

• Start date: 1 September 2006• Duration 30 months (March 2009)

ePSIplus mission

• Monitoring implementation of PSI directive• Identifying barriers and conflicts• Increasing awareness of the value of PSI re-use

to business and the economy• Promoting and providing examples of best

practice in the area of PSI re-use• Making recommendations to EU on how best to

move forward

ePSIplus stakeholders

Five thematic areas

1 Legal and regulatory progress and impact

2 Public sector organisation and culture change

3 Encouraging PSI reuse business

4 The financial impact: pricing and charging

5 Information management, standards and data quality

• Identify emerging good practice and support clarification of standards issues in relation to improving on-line discovery and access to PSI across PSI sectors and national borders.

• Create a basis for improving technical interoperability between the public and the private sectors, focusing especially on mission critical standards areas such as metadata and identifiers which have the potential to ease PSI re-use

• Develop a clearer view and build consensus on what constitutes acceptable data quality for PSI re-use in different key sectors

Information management, standards and data quality: ePSIplus project brief

• Do public sector bodies know what information they have?

• How is Public Sector Information structured, identified and described so that potential re-users can find the information relevant to them?

• How do potential re-users find out know what they are allowed to do with the information when they do find it?

Discovery and access to PSI

Article 9 Practical Arrangements

Member States shall ensure that practical arrangements are in place that facilitate the search for documents available for re-use, such as asset lists, accessible preferably online, of main documents, and portal sites that are linked to decentralised assets lists.

PSI Directive: PSI Asset Lists

• A catalogue of the information held by a public sector organisation

• A “registry of registries” and of other public sector information that may be made available for re-use in accordance with the PSI Directive

• …enabling potential re-users to discover what PSI information assets are available for inclusion in new information products etc.

What is an Information Asset Register?

• To provide a comprehensive resource that does not require an advanced understanding of the structure of Government. Users need not know which departments hold the information they seek, as a search is made across the whole of government.

• To cater for the pressing demand to identify unpublished data holdings within Government. This complements both official bibliographies which only list material that is published and Freedom of Information Publication Schemes.

• To facilitate and encourage the re-use of government information

Why create an Information Asset Register?

• enables public sector organisations to follow an asset-based approach to managing their information resources

• provides a mechanism for maintaining and auditing key information assets

• provides a means of understanding what information assets are held by others

• reduces the risk of devaluing knowledge about information assets within a department when staff move

Information Asset Registers: benefits to public sector organisations

• provides knowledge of the information collected by the public sector in a consistent and useful way

• helps businesses and citizens to re-use public sector information, supporting economic growth

• enables a clearer understanding of the opportunities for developing value added products

• identifies public sector information assets that can be used in new information products.

UK Office of Public Sector Information

Asset lists: benefits citizens and businesses

• Even where government and PSI coordinating bodies are themselves committed to compiling registries of PSI assets, this is seldom a priority for either local government or other public sector organizations.

• Since it is not practical to produce comprehensive PSI inventories, local government would find it useful to have guidance on priorities and areas of current re-use

Some conclusions from the first ePSIplus standards thematic meeting

• Privacy/data protection are often used as a reason for not making PSI available. – Possible use of trusted third parties to “anonymise”

data

• Pan-European standards need to be agreed for PSI identification and metadata

• Search engines / automated “spiders” could be set to crawl and identify digitally available PSI and return standard descriptions and usage terms.

Some conclusions from the first ePSIplus standards thematic meeting

Constraints

• Many public sector bodies don’t have an asset register and don’t have time and resources to build one

• Some PSI will never be reused so is it worth the effort to include it? Need to prioritise areas of potential re-use.

• Pan-European standards required for the structure and syntax of data in PSI asset registers

What has been done so far?

• Some national examples of progress on PSI asset registers:– Latvia – Ireland– UK: OPSI

• Pan-European asset register demonstrator– PSI Navigator

Standards issues

• Not a problem for centralised national asset registers• Standards being developed on a national basis for

distributed asset registers– Some controlled lists of subject areas but mainly free text

keywords

– Metadata elements (Dublin Core)

• Are pan-European standards desirable?– Essential for OAI-type “confederated searching”

• Are they possible?– EUROVOC?

• TITLE: Title of resource, with additional or alternative titles if they exist.

• IARN: The IAR Number; a unique number identifying each record. The first part of the number indicates which organisation created the record.

• IDENTIFIER: Identifier or acronym by which the resource may be commonly known, or file name with full path.

• DESCRIPTION: A description of the information contained the resource. An abstract if the resource is document-like. A content description of visual or other resources.

• SUBJECT: Keywords and phrases indicating the subject matter of the resource.

• COVERAGE: Geographic area covered by the information in the resource.

• DATE: The date on which the resource was created or published.

• UPDATING FREQUENCY: For databases etc, to indicate currency.

• DATE MODIFIED: The date on which a database or other resource was last updated.

• SOURCE: The source(s) of the information found in the resource.

• FORMAT: Physical formats of resource. Examples: Book, CD-ROM, Database (Access 97;); Collection of documents (Word 6, 17 files)

• LANGUAGE: The language(s) of the resource content.

• AUTHOR: Person, group or organisation responsible for the intellectual content of the resource.

• PUBLISHER: The office or organisation to be contacted for further information about, or access to, the resource.

• RIGHTS: Basic indication of the user’s rights to view, copy, redistribute or republish all or part of the information held in the database.

• CATEGORY: A term/terms from the Government Category List (GCL). Users can search for all the records covered by each term from the GCL

OPSI - UK

Discussion issues

• Are Information Asset Registers important?– Will they stimulate PSI re-use

• How do they relate to FOI lists?– Published v unpublished data

• Centralised or distributed asset lists?– If distributed, how will they be searchable?

• Do we need standards? If so which ones?• Can the process of creating registries be

automated?• What about the “semantic web”?

Standards for PSI asset lists

Forum topic at:

www.ePSIplus.net

Welcome and introduction (Brian Green, ePSIplus)

Information Asset Registries: the Latvian solution (Toms Celmillers, Consultant, State Information Systems Unit) Information Asset Registries: a view from local government (Mary Rowlatt, Essex County Council UK) PSI Navigator project  Public - private collaboration in the compilation of asset registers (Anthony Black, Intelligent Addressing)

The Market for PSI (Adrian Norman, PSIphon) Discussion and recommendations