Why London is pivoting its data approach
London’s plan to overhaul its Datastore demonstrates a marked shift away from the early days of smart city open data. Sarah Wray talks to Chief Digital Officer Theo Blackwell about the new direction.
London is replacing its Datastore open data platform with a new Data for London hub that will act as a ‘central library catalogue’ for data held by both the public and private sector.
The new infrastructure and name represent a fresh approach in London, reflecting changes in both technology and broader thinking.
Rather than ingesting ever-more data and hoping someone finds it useful, the focus with Data for London is on sourcing data based on needs and linking to where it is held.
“The Datastore outgrew its original functionality,” Theo Blackwell, London’s Chief Digital Officer, told Cities Today, noting that there were an increasing number of requests from people to develop services that would also include the sharing of non-open data.
“If you want to plot where you’re going to build schools in London, you need open data and private data from the Department for Education on who the pupils are and where they live in order to create a heatmap,” explains Blackwell.
“Open data couldn’t solve the whole problem of the kinds of things that were really useful for the city.”
Alongside open data, London’s High Streets Data Service incorporates data from partners, including aggregated and anonymised spend data from Mastercard and footfall data from O2.
In addition, as London tackles issues such as air quality, it needs to be able to use various types of sensor and real-time data, which the Datastore wasn’t built for when it launched in 2010.
Rather than splashing out on an off-the-shelf platform with all the latest whistles and bells, the city has allocated £500,000 (US$605,000) for the cloud-based infrastructure which will be developed by the Greater London Authority with a technical partner. This is a departure from the software-as-a-service Datastore.
“With software-as-a-service you have to hope the roadmap of the company you’re buying from chimes with the roadmap that you want to see,” says Blackwell.
“Our objective now is to build something with a light core, and then the future functionality as dictated by the users would be built in a modular way. That could be buying best in class or building something ourselves – we’ve got the option to be a bit more mixed economy on the build.
