Today’s Christmas pudding of a post comes studded with good things and slightly alcoholic - its a data themed day at Digital Policy towers (aka the co-working room at St Andrew’s House - its awfy busy in here the day, is there something happening with the Scottish Government I should know about?).
Got 2 working papers today (only 2 more to finish before I stop and start writing up the final report.
The first is Working Paper No 5 - Law reform for data which looks at the structure of legislation, how it interacts with data standards and meta data and some design criteria for the specification of a modern system for expressing law that pertains to data, and the actual data itself (not the same thing) in a way that makes it possible to reason about data holistically across the state footprint. This would serve both the state well - better utilisation of data resources and design of new systems - and the citizen - better access to justice.
There’s lots of moving parts in it.
The second is Working Paper No 6 - A solera for data cleansing. Getting from where-we-are to where-we-want-to-be is not going to be an instant process. Working Paper No 5 - Law reform for data sketches a evolutionary process for all state data, and Working Paper No 6 - A solera for data cleansing proposes an solera - a set of technical structures that enable us to ‘mature’ state data incrementally. As the legal process of one are applied, the technical infrastructure of the other can be used to make the data available. The solera focusses on analytical as opposed to operational data - but the extension of use process should be trivially extendable.
The name solera comes from sherry production - you take sherry out of the bottom barrel, well matured, do a bum shuffle down the solera and add the new raw wine in the top. Every bottle that comes out has a bit of last years wine, a bit of the year before’s a bit of the year before that’s, all blended in a lovely manner. The point of reforming legislation as it pertains to data is to get our hands on it.