1. Citadel On the Move: Why standards
matter
Andrew Stott
Expert Adviser, Citadel on the Move
formerly Director, data.gov.uk
OKCon 2013
17 Sep 2013
@dirdigeng
andrew.stott@dirdigeng.com

2.  EU-funded project
 City-level Open Data from
Manchester, Ghent, Athens, Issy
and other EU cities
 Mobile applications for tourism
and transport
 Open source templates for further
adaption
 Applications should “just work”
“anywhere”
Citadel On The Move

3.  Public and road transport
information
 Museums, hotels, restaurants,
toilets etc.
 Festivals, exhibitions,
presentations, etc.
 Detailed descriptions of each
 'Near-me' functionality using
geo-location
 Accepts QR codes
Transport, Points of Interest
and Events

4. Citadel On The Move Application Flow
 Application senses where it is
 Application locates data repository for city
 Application searches repository for type of
data it needs
 Application obtains metadata to interpret the
data
 Application uses Open Commons to build
strategy and tool chain to use the data
 Application access the data and displays it
Then it’s the user’s turn

5. The challenge for licensing & standards
 At “develop time” neither the developer nor
the application know whose data they are
going to use
 Design goal is
‒ to make acquisition of new data automatic
and programmatic
‒ not to have to maintain/refresh/revise the
core application to incorporate a new city
 Therefore the data source has to describe the
data and how it can be used in a way that the
existing application can understand
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6. What this means for licensing & standards
 A dataset’s data structure, semantics and
licence needs to machine-interpretable
 Not necessarily one standard – but not one
standard per city either
 Standards for the same sort of data from
different jurisdictions more important (to us)
than common standards within a city.
 EU expectation of national governments
developing their own licences & standards
does not help us
 A standard for standards and licenses?
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7. End
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