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My name is John Sheridan. I’m the Head of Legislation Services at the National Archives.
There are some brilliant examples of people who have developed new products and services
using the legislation.gov.uk API. There are two iPhone apps. We also have major companies
who are integrating legislation data from our API into the core of their products and
services. A good example of that would be a company such as the Practical Law Company,
who’ve made great use of the API, and have integrated it with other information; other
explanations about legislation text that they can include in their own product.
So when people want to use legislation data, they’re able to do that under the terms
of the Open Government licence. So that means that all of the data that we have can be reused
for free. We’ve also made available the source code that we have, that allows people
to process that data in their own applications for free, and we’ve put that on a thing
called Github; a code repository. We make it very easy for people to pick up
and use the data in the way in which suits their own product, or their own service. We’ve
used open standards for everything that we have developed. That means that both the data
is very portable. It means that it helps us when we need to re-procure the services, because
we can have a good competition from different suppliers.
We’ve also made sure that the application logic; the code that processes the content,
is also constructed using open standards. That means that other people can pick up our
tools, and they can easily adapt them for their own purposes. We’re very keen to collaborate,
again, particularly with the private sector. We can develop the code, but potentially people
from outside of government can help us by improving that codebase, and everyone can
benefit. You can’t spec your way into a system as
complicated as legislation.gov.uk. You simply could not write a specification for a piece
of work for a system that is that difficult to build. Or if you did, you would spend a
year writing the specification, rather than a year writing the code.
The story of legislation.gov.uk goes back several years. Legislation has always been
published, for a long time in print. It’s even published in vellum, still to this day.
To create the high-quality public service online that the public expects; a world where
you can just go to Google, type the name of your favourite statute and access it in just
one or two clicks, we had to think really carefully about how we were going to structure
and organise the content; how we were going to develop the service to meet users’ needs
and expectations. So if you’re going to build a website, build
the website on top of your own API and associate your API and the website really closely, so
that your website – your online presentation of the data – documents your raw data. It
will help developers understand how to use and consume that data really well.