Tools and services supporting the use of local data | Local Government Association

"The LGA is a key advocate of open data publishing and local government transparency. For over a decade, the LGA has coordinated the development of sector-wide tools and guidelines. Find more information about them below. Data standards Information standards in local government A range of data publishing standards, schemas and practical search and publishing tools continue to be developed and maintained for free general use on the LGA open data pages. Semantic standards to reference data in local government Semantic standards are definitions of all aspects of local government business that can be referenced by all suppliers or local services as tags to their information records to give assurance that all suppliers are referring to the same subject. Since 2002 the LGA has facilitated the development and upkeep of the Local Government Business Model (LGBM) which is recognised as the definitive model of local government semantics.  This comprises a series of open public interconnected lists of definitions for indexing everything we do in the public sector.  Each list is maintained to reflect changes in legislation and is version controlled.  Each item in each list is uniquely referenced with persistent identifiers in both human and machine readable form for use in local data standards.  These standards are used in national data publication specifications and drive initiatives such as transparency reporting, GOV.UK discovery tools and app developments...."