News Story

The Shakespeare Review

John Domingue, Wednesday 29 May 2013

KMi’s John Domingue joined a team of experts in February 2013 to contribute to an independent review of public sector information, The Shakespeare Review, which has now been published, was led by Stephan Shakespeare, Chair of the Data Strategy Board – a body set up by BIS. The Review makes nine recommendations to government around the growth opportunities of, and how to widen access to, the wealth of information held by the public sector. Professor Domingue is the Chair of the European Semantic Web Conference series, and an OU team led by KMi’s Dr Mathieu D’Aquin, created the Open Data University service: http://data.open.ac.uk as the world’s first comprehensive LInked Data portal for a higher education institution.

"The need for high quality training in the Linked Data area is particularly relevant for the Open University", said Professor Domingue. "I’m very happy to see that this is now taken up as Recommendation 6 of the review". The review recommendation 6 is: "Building on existing activities around capability, there should be a focused programme of investment to build skill-sets in basic data science through our academic institutions, covering both genuinely unfettered ‘basic research’ and research of ‘practical immediate value’ to the national data strategy. We cannot rely only on markets and government departments and wider public sector bodies to maximise the potential of this relatively new and fast-developing field in which we are positioned to be a world leader."

"Indeed, it is a major topic of research here, such as in my own EUCLID project under the EU FP7 Research Programme", he added. "But also critical for the future integration of scholarly knowledge exchange and future teaching syndication. As the review says, of ‘practical immediate value’ indeed!"