Citadel On the Move: Why standards

matter

Andrew Stott

Expert Adviser, Citadel on the Move

formerly Director, data.gov.uk

OKCon 2013

17 Sep 2013

@dirdigeng

andrew.stott@dirdigeng.com

EU-funded project

City-level Open Data from Manchester, Ghent, Athens, Issy and other EU cities

Mobile applications for tourism and transport

Open source templates for further adaption

Applications should “just work” “anywhere”

Citadel On The Move

Public and road transport information

Museums, hotels, restaurants, toilets etc.

Festivals, exhibitions, presentations, etc.

Detailed descriptions of each

'Near-me' functionality using geo-location

Accepts QR codes

Transport, Points of Interest and Events

Citadel On The Move Application Flow

Application senses where it is

Application locates data repository for city

Application searches repository for type of

data it needs

Application obtains metadata to interpret the

data

Application uses Open Commons to build

strategy and tool chain to use the data

Application access the data and displays it

Then it’s the user’s turn

The challenge for licensing & standards

At “develop time” neither the developer nor

the application know whose data they are

going to use

Design goal is

‒ to make acquisition of new data automatic

and programmatic

‒ not to have to maintain/refresh/revise the

core application to incorporate a new city

Therefore the data source has to describe the

data and how it can be used in a way that the

existing application can understand 5

What this means for licensing & standards

A dataset’s data structure, semantics and

licence needs to machine-interpretable

Not necessarily one standard – but not one

standard per city either

Standards for the same sort of data from

different jurisdictions more important (to us)

than common standards within a city.

EU expectation of national governments

developing their own licences & standards

does not help us

A standard for standards and licenses? 6

End

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