Cabinet Office Chief Information Officer
Last updated: 10 November 2009
An information architecture is vital to ensuring that information and data can flow across government to provide seamless, efficient, secure and trusted services. It also provides opportunities for the re-use of non-personal public data, helping to fuel innovation.
URI sets will be an integral component of a UK Public Sector Information Architecture. URI sets can be published by the UK public sector to provide comprehensive and reliable identifiers for ‘Things’ such as schools, roads, legislation, locations, projects, events and so on. Where the quality of these sets can be described consistently, other data owners will have the confidence to re-use them in their own data, leading to a web of data that can be linked, queried, and aggregated.
Designing URI Sets for the UK Public Sector is a part of the family of policy and guidance documents associated with the cross-Government Enterprise Architecture (xGEA). As sets are built and trialled, some scenarios may emerge that suggest that a rule may not be appropriate in some circumstances. Similarly, it may become apparent that there is value in considering that a piece of guidance should become a rule. It can therefore be expected that the interim design laid out in this paper will be tested and challenged by some early adopters, leading to a refresh.