BIS Research Funding Explorer
For the UK Government Department Business Innovation and Skills (BIS), fulfilling its mission of stimulating inward investment means promoting areas of innovation across the country. Yet until recently, BIS has struggled to present a comprehensive and coherent picture of the UK research innovation programmes it funds, and their associated economic outcomes.
Discovering data.gov.uk
An exciting UK technology initiative provided a substantial opportunity. Former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, had recently initiated a drive to open up government data. This resulted in data.gov.uk – an open hub of government data supported by Talis, a UK technology company drawing on over forty years of delivering reliable and innovative data services, and now employing some of the brightest minds in Semantic Web research.
By interacting with data.gov.uk, staff at BIS saw the value of Linked Data – a form of joined-up meaningful data on the web – and realised that the fragmentary data held by BIS and its partner organisations (research councils and the Patent Office) could not easily be brought together and shared universally as long as it contained inconsistent terminology held in a variety of incompatible formats, from spreadsheets to XML files.
Talis and BIS join forces
“What Talis did in a tiny period of time was amazing, and we received great feedback from our partners and everyone who saw the prototype. Talis’ work has had a positive impact beyond the department, and has successfully illustrated how government funding results directly in innovation.”
David Welch
Head of Information Rights at BIS
Together, BIS and Talis envisioned a web-based prototype application that combined this disparate data. Exploiting Talis’ pre-eminent position in Semantic Web technology, the prototype would visualise BIS’s research innovation programmes and their associated outcomes.
The team at BIS set its sights on demonstrating this ground-breaking prototype (which became known as the BIS Research Funding Explorer) at an international conference on innovation strategy, only four weeks away to be presided over by the Prime Minister himself. The conference offered unparalleled profile to the project, and as David Welch, Head of Information Rights at BIS recalls, “We were aware that Talis had supported the data.gov.uk initiative – their track record meant that we were in safe hands.”
BIS had seen the value of the agile approach characteristic of Linked Data projects, which made this tight deadline possible, as Talis’ Senior Consultant explains, “The traditional approach of analysing every possible use of data prior to system development is untenable. With Linked Data projects, we simply draw the data together then work out how to cross-relate the concepts. This is much more efficient.”
Developing a high impact application
The project focussed on four areas of UK advanced technology– RFID, Plastic Electronics, Regenerative Medicine and Advanced Composite Materials. Talis passed the data through a series of tools to extract data related to those four areas. By making use of existing naming conventions from the Linked Data world, users could draw the disparate datasets together for analysis.
Despite the challenging timescales, the Talis team was keen to demonstrate a core benefit of Linked Data (namely creating relationships across disparate datasets) by using the government’s education data – the Edubase dataset – to enrich BIS’ university data. As all parties had anticipated, the Linked Data approach proved to be both efficient and agile, with BIS and Talis in daily contact.
For the rapidly approaching conference, the project needed a high impact user interface to bring to life the concept of Linked Data. Talis’ close relationships in the Semantic Web community led to a partnership with Iconomorphics, an Amsterdam-based visualisation company with experience of Linked Data projects. Talis and Iconomorphics designed the interface and modified the data model when early visualisation work suggested enhancements. Within 10 days, preliminary presentations were ready. The BIS team identified expected anomalies from the rapid data modelling, and Talis continued to refine the data model as the data was converted to RDF (the Linked Data format) and put into a single datastore on the Talis platform.
The BIS Research Funding Explorer
Iconomorphics delivered three ways of engaging with BIS’ data: firstly, users can view and interrogate a timeline of funding allocations; secondly, a cumulative bar chart shows the build-up of research investment and patents over time. The third visualisation element, a heat map of the UK denoting level of activity in a given region, “means that you can see money go in, research areas emerge, and clusters of small companies build up”, as David Welch points out.
Beneath the visualisation, pages of more detailed data showcase the follow-your-nose browsability that is the hallmark of semantic-enabled applications. Anyone, from potential investors and government ministers to members of the public, can drill into the data by region, company, project or organisation, and then navigate to more detailed pages. As the Senior Consultant at Talis explains, “Up to now, we’ve only been able to find content on the web by searching for it. The BIS Research Funding Explorer demonstrates how a Linked Data approach transforms the discovery of information on the web, by meeting the need to navigate around information associated with a search result and other entities.”
Launch and beyond…
“At the click of a button we can now identify the UK’s centres of excellence.”
Gordon Brown
Former Prime Minister
As planned, the prototype was completed and launched in just over two weeks, giving the speech writers sufficient notice to prepare for its inclusion at the conference. This powerful use of one area of UK expertise, Linked Data, to identify other areas of innovation across the country, demonstrated BIS’ valuable role in promoting UK innovation; the Prime Minister declared that “At the click of a button we can now identify the UK’s centres of excellence.”
Ease of reuse lies at the heart of Linked Data, and like all data published in this form, it does not sit in isolation. By ensuring that all the converted BIS data met the guidelines for publishing on the data.gov.uk hub, linking with other government data was possible from the outset. Since the successful conclusion of the project and the publication of Ordnance Survey data, other parties have reused the data to obtain more location-specific views of UK innovation, by looking at funding within Britain’s European Regions or parliamentary constituencies.
David Welch concludes, “What Talis did in a tiny period of time was amazing, and we received great feedback from our partners and everyone who saw the prototype. Talis’ work has had a positive impact beyond the department, and has successfully illustrated how government funding results directly in innovation, leading to new products and even new industries. We were delighted with the work Talis carried out for us and were greatly impressed with their unfailingly professional approach.”
The BIS Research Funding Explorer is available at http://bis.clients.talis.com/.
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