Disclaimer: the following is my own perspective on the build & design of the Ordnance Survey Linked Data platform. I don’t presume to speak for the OS and don’t have any inside knowledge of their long term plans.

Having said that I wanted to share some of the goals we (Julian Higman, Benjamin Nowack and myself) had when approaching the design of the platform. I will say that we had the full support and encouragement of the Ordnance Survey throughout the project, especially John Goodwin and others in the product management team.

Background & Goals

The original Ordnance Survey Linked Data site launched in April 2010. At the time it was a leading example of adoption of Linked Data by a public sector organisation. But time moves on and both the site and the data were due for a refresh. With Talis’ withdrawal from the data hosting business, the OS decided to bring the data hosting in-house and contracted Julian, Benjamin and myself to carry out the work.

While the migration from Talis was a key driver, the overall goal was to deliver a new Linked Data platform that would make a great showcase for the Ordnance Survey Linked Data. The beta of the new site was launched in April and went properly live at the beginning of June.

We had a number of high-level goals that we set out to achieve in the project:

Provide value for everyone, not just developers — the original site was very developer-centric, offering a very limited user experience with no easy way to browse the data. We wanted everyone to begin sharing links to the Ordnance Survey pages and that meant that the site needed a clean, user-friendly design. This meant we approached it from the point of building an application, not just a data portal

Deliver more than Linked Data — we wanted to offer a set of APIs that made the data accessible and useful for people who weren’t familiar with Linked Data or SPARQL. This meant offering some simpler tools to enable people to search and link to the data

Deliver a good developer user experience –this meant integrating API explorers, plenty of examples, and clear documentation. We wanted to shorten the “time to first JSON” to get developers into the data as fast as possible

Showcase the OS services and products — the OS offer a number of other web services and location products. The data should provide a way to show that value. Integrating mapping tools was the obvious first step

Support latest standards and best practices — where possible we wanted to make sure that the site offered standard APIs and formats, and conformed to the latest best practices around open data publishing

Support multiple datasets — the platform has been designed to support multiple datasets, allowing users to use just the data they need or the whole combined dataset. This provides more options for both publishing and consuming the data

Build a solid platform to support further innovation — we wanted to leave the OS with an extensible, scalable platform to allow them to further experiment with Linked Data

Best Practices & Standards

From a technical perspective we need to refresh not just the data but the APIs used to access it. This meant replacing the SPARQL 1.0 endpoint and custom search interface offered in the original with more standard APIs.

We also wanted to make the data and APIs discoverable and adopted a “completionist” approach to try and tick all the boxes for publishing and exposing dataset metadata, including basic versioning and licensing information.

As a result we ended up with:

Clearly there’s more that could be potentially done. Tools can always be improved, but the best way for that to happen is through user feedback. I’d love to know what you think of the platform.

Overall I think we’ve achieved our goal of making a site that, while clearly developer oriented, offers a good user experience for non-developers. I’ll be interested to see what people do with the data over the coming months