What's needed to discover, link and combine open datasets | Mike Thacker

"I’ve been banging on about how we need better ways of finding and combining datasets for so long now with little obvious impact, that I was beginning to lose conviction, but slowly the message is coming home. We need to improve how we can discover, link and combine related data from multiple sources if we’re going to properly exploit open data. Whether you’re a data scientist trying to establish the link between licensing hours and antisocial behaviour, a pressure group that wants to alert people to planning proposals or an innovator who wants to enhance a web presence with localised information, you have to take data from hundreds of sources to build something suitable that works across the country. Advances in computer science have changed the landscape a little, but we still lack basic information identifying datasets, their content and their quality. We need to deploy common patterns to enable combining and linking datasets...."