The Standards Hub is a platform where users can get involved in the process for prioritizing and helping the UK Government to select open standards for Government IT. The main aim is to choose a small set of core standards that are to be applied consistently across the UK government to make the offered services better for users and to keep the costs down.
A recently suggested challenge on the website, (more information on challenge types or how to submit a challenge on Standards Hub) tackles the question of data catalog interoperability. With the explosion of open data being published, there is a clear need for a common standard for publishing the records about each dataset - the metadata. Public Bodies are publishing their data on their own websites and increasingly it is provided with the metadata. This is why there is a need to standardize the representation of the metadata in order to offer efficient data catalog interoperability to different users (Catalogue Owners, Public & Data users, Developers and Data publishers).
It is expected that this will vastly simplify the process of federating metadata across the many data catalogues that are implemented today, and make it easier for those wishing to join the ecosystem to do so without the burden of many implementations for various pseudo-standards. Interoperability, enabling migration and sharing between many disparate systems will improve the resilience and dependability of that metadata. Providing a standard to show the relationships between various metadata will allow for new opportunities and would be the foundation for standardised schema for specific types of metadata (a standard schema for spending data is easier if the metadata is standardised). A linked-data standard would enable cross-catalogue searches and a 'known' extensibility in the description of the metadata. That is there is a known mechanism for extending the schema without ad-hoc undocumented additions to a proprietary schema.
The proposed standard should be open, flexible, future-proof, and fit for purpose.
For more information and submit a standard, visit Standards Hub on this link.
More information
UK Standards Hub launches challenge on Persistent Resolvable Identifiers