The Vision
To provide a customised organisation chart (organogram) visualisation for human users with the capability to download machine-readable data via a Linked Data API and by SPARQL Query from an RDF store.
To meet new requirements for transparency, financial information such as reporting structures, salary bands and the combined salaries of direct reports would need to be provided.
The Linked Data output will gain value over time, enabling users to see the changes to the machinery of government as departments and their responsibilities evolve.
The Solution
The new system was devised by John Sheridan of The National Archives and Jeni Tennison, working as a consultant to TSO with a superb visualisation by Dan Smith. It went live in June 2011.
The system sits upon TSO’s OpenUp® platform services, including:
- Harvesting – setting up a pipeline to process good quality department data
- Enriching – extracting RDF
- Storage – ensuring RDF is stored and available
- Publishing – making the data available on the web through both an API (to support data re-use) and a visualisation
The Challenges
It was a complex project, the first occasion on which every government department has published RDF.
There were technical challenges to:
