What does Open Data mean for HESA?
Last year saw us launch an exciting new strategy to publish much of our data as open data. As one of HESA’s two Open Data Champions, I wanted to update you on our progress so far.
We aim to lead the way in widening access to our datasets.
Izzy and I started as Open Data Champions in March (you can meet us both here) with the aim of leading the way in widening access to our datasets. Since then we have been reviewing your feedback to our consultation and working closely with the experts at the Open Data Institute (ODI) to enhance our expertise.
What is Open Data at HESA?
Open data at HESA will be freely accessible to anyone, made available in machine readable format.
Our key aim over the last months has been to define what open data would mean to HESA. The open data strategy focused on two elements: freely accessible and machine readable. By freely accessible we mean downloadable free of charge to anyone with internet access. Our mission is to support the advancement of the higher education landscape, and we do this in part by collecting timely and meaningful data and making it available to the widest possible audiences.
A challenge we faced was understanding what is meant by ‘machine readability’ and the implications for us. We’ve been making excellent headway in understanding how to modernise our publications, starting to release some of them under an open data licence. This work has focused on publishing data in formats that suit human reading – typically styled Excel documents. However, through our work with the ODI we’ve come to learn that the path to becoming truly open requires consideration around format.
We are now focusing on upskilling ourselves and developing the systems to allow us to publish such machine readable data.
Machine readable data is data that can be automatically read by a computer. This means using formats such as CSV, XML or JSON where the data is structured in such a way that it can be processed and read by a computer. It also means making the data discoverable by computer – through using consistent and predictable url structures – and providing accompanying computer-readable metadata. We are now focusing on upskilling ourselves and developing the systems to allow us to publish such machine readable data.
How will we enhance our open data?
Our analysis and insight allows us to add context to our open data – making it information.
Open data is hugely important in increasing the usage of our data and removing barriers to accessing it. But we do not just publish data – we also possess specialist expertise in statistical analysis in the HE sector. This additional analysis and insight provided by our excellent information and analysis teams allows us to add context to our open data – making it information. In a recent blog, my colleague Matt Clarke discusses how our publications are evolving, echoing this sentiment that we want you to know how to get the most from our data.
Next steps
In addition to further investigating producing data in machine-readable formats, we’re also working hard on our next key challenge: finding the right balance between confidentiality, disclosure control and making the data as useful and meaningful as possible.
We will publish our first, fully open data publication in February - Students in Higher Education 2016/17
This work will culminate in our first, fully open data publication: Students in Higher Education 2016/17. This will be published in February 2018 as open data to showcase what we’ve learnt so far and put guidance from the ODI and other open data experts into practice. We will be using this publication to pilot some of our ideas – it won’t be perfect, and we will be relying on support and feedback from you to improve our future releases.
Feedback
We’d be really open to hearing some of your experiences with open data.
Between now and then, however, we’d be really open (pun intended) to hearing some of your experiences: have you dealt with similar challenges in making your data open? In using open data? Defining machine readability? Or any general lessons learnt in open data best practice?
Please get in touch with us with any comments or questions, recommendations or experiences with open data via [email protected], Twitter (@HannahCCramer) or in the comments below.
If you want to be kept up to date with our open data work - or if you'd be interested in engaging with our pilot - please register for updates.
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What does open data mean for HESA?: An update on HESA's publication plans.
