Our open data blog is now err, open.

We’ve set up a new blog over at http://warwickshireopendata.wordpress.com/ to provide details of our work in this area and to help publicise our new open data web site which should be up and running in the next couple of weeks.

An all-star selection of WCC ICT bloggers will be posting all sorts of stuff there on the subject of open data, local government related and otherwise, please feel free to let us know what you think at the blog or via opendata@warwickshire.gov.uk.

How the Warwickshire iPhone App will lead to open data

In an exciting, albeit slightly unexpected move, Apple cleared the Warwickshire iPhone application for download from iTunes on Christmas Eve. As such my planned multimedia blitzkrieg to publicise the launch was completely stuffed.

Now that everyone is back at work we have started to promote this new approach to our staff and citizens through our web site (www.warwickshire.gov.uk/iphone) and via a twitter account (www.twitter.com/wcciphone), there will also be more traditional internal communications and press releases being sent out. The app itself can be downloaded for free from http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/warwickshire/id345904759?mt=8

Although the focus of this project has bee the actual iPhone app, the real point behind this work has been to act as a stimulus for starting to provide data in open formats and in a universal manner. To this end we have been using a series of RSS feeds and XML web services to expose information on a subset of WCC’s information and services.

Now that this model is in place there are two key aims in the short term:

1. Expose more information so that we can feed a greater variety of services to the iPhone application and hopefully provide some richer functions.
2. Establish a set of standards for exposing data from WCC and establish an open data web presence for the authority – enabling anyone who is interested to make use of our data for their own analysis, applications or web sites.

This project is underway and I hope to have something visible to the public around the end of February. Priority areas for opening up data are going to be around geographical and democratic info. Despite these initial priorities, we are keen to hear from anyone who has other ideas on the type of information that should be made available.

Infrastructure R&D Update

The current Research & Development phase is nearly over. In the last couple of weeks the following projects have been worked on by Winston, Sukhpal and Tim:

Lifecycle Management
This project focused on the lifecycle within ICT and how the infrastructure needs to be provisioned in order to support the stages identified.
Link to wiki page

Infrastructure API and Provisioning Resources
This project was concerned with the provisioning of infrastructure resources through an API driven by a manual or programmatic event.
Link to wiki page

Elastic Application Platform
This project investigated how the infrastructure would provide a platform in support of an application with an associated service level agreement.
Link to wiki page

What Next?
With Identity and Infrastructure conceptual R&D coming to an end planning needs to be completed for the next phase, Architecture.

A reminder of the R&D Phases.

1. Conceptual: researching and testing the assumptions and concepts that our strategic vision is based on. For example in the sphere of applications our concepts include service orientation, business process focus and contextual access.

2. Architectural: understanding the logical building blocks that we will need in order to realise the concepts.

3. Technical: identifying the products and technologies that can best fulfil the roles defined by the architecture, taking constraints (historical, commercial etc) into account.

Work to date
For links to all the work carried out to date follow this link.