The private sector answer to exploiting public sector data

The UK government has mounted, and in some cases joined, a variety of initiatives in recent years aimed at open standards, open source software and, perhaps above all, open data.

At government level this means transparency and the ability of organisations and the public at large to access the various datasets they may have a vested interest in.

The UK government joined the Open Government Partnership (OGP) as a founding member in 2011. The OGP was established with a remit to establish "an international platform for domestic reformers", a label which the UK would presumably like to wear, were it not for its own various back-pedalling on open data and Freedom of Information (FOI) targets, due to legacy system issues and other complexities.

The government established the National Information Infrastructure (NII), committed to creating "as complete an inventory of the datasets they hold as possible". Once again, although initiatives of this kind set out with the best intentions, pragmatic rationalisation and execution are often a harder trick to pull off.

The government justifies the need to create a transparent environment for open data because, in its own view, over the past three years it has become clear that public sector information is capable of driving significant social and economic growth in the UK.

The NII published a white paper in October 2013 entitled Setting out a National Information Infrastructure. Its authors note: "Innovative applications and services have been developed using government open data from datasets whose value was not immediately obvious."

The government advocates a "twin-track" approach to the release of government data, focusing in the first instance on the release of "core reference data"; and then related "unspecified other" datasets.

Given the interplay and interconnect points between business and government today, how do big suppliers such as SAP, Oracle and IBM offer tools to help organisations and governments categorise data for the purposes of governance, risk and compliance (or GRC as it is now increasingly known)?

Oracle for its part has been nothing if not formal on this subject and has published a white paper, entitled Transparency in the Public Sector: Its Importance and How Oracle Supports Governments Efforts, to set out its stall.

Oracle says it offers a variety of technology and application products that can support government transparency efforts anywhere. The supplier says governments can use its Endeca enterprise content management tool to give citizens an easy way to search for and retrieve a wide variety of documents.

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The private sector answer to exploiting public sector data