FAQ

1. What is data.parliament.uk?

2. What standards does data.parliament.uk meet?

3. Who developed data.parliament.uk and why? (Including the current status – beta)

4. Under what license is the data available?

5. How can people submit work done using our datasets?

6. How can I access datasets?

7. How were the datasets selected? And can I request datasets?

8. Will more data become available in the future?

1.What is data.parliament.uk?

Data.parliament (DDP) is a platform that enables us to share our data both within and outside of Parliament. The aim of data.parliament is to ensure that our data is both accessible and useable. Most of the data is already public, but this project is about ensuring that it is exposed in a better and richer way. It’s a big project, and the service will continue to develop and grow after the platform has launched.  In time, we hope that all published Parliamentary information will be available on DDP.

2. What standards does data.parliament.uk meet?

Data.Parliament supports and implements open standards wherever possible. Standards we use include, ATOM, RDF, XML, JSON, REST, Dublin Core & RDF. We also follow Tim Berners-Lee’s Five Star approach for Open Data, with many of our datasets meeting the five star standard.

3. Who developed data.parliament.uk and why? (Including the current status – beta)

Data.parliament.uk was developed by Parliament’s Digital Service and is our response to the growing demand for open data, which is the policy of making data produced by public sector bodies freely available so that it can be re-used.  We hope that this will encourage public understanding of the work of Parliament and enable citizens to find out more easily about the work Members of both Houses of Parliament have been doing on their behalf.  The Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy strongly supported the release of open data by Parliament.

Data.parliament.uk is currently in beta. This means there will be continual enhancements which you can read about via our blog as they happen and we are always looking for feedback regarding data.parliament.uk.

4. Under what license is the data available?

Most of the datasets on data.parliament.uk are licensed under the Open Parliament License unless otherwise stated. You can read more about what that means on our license page.

5. How can people submit work done using our datasets?

At present, we have no direct submission process to the data.parliament.uk platform although we are interested to see what may have been developed using Parliamentary datasets and may be able to feature such work on our blog. We are also encouraging feedback from our users regarding data.parliament.uk to help improve the platform.

Please contact the data.parliament.uk team either via email (contactus@ddp.com) or on Twitter. Please send links of all applications developed or a link to your Github page.

6. How can I access datasets?

Data is available in a variety of formats and there are many ways in which you can access the datasets. You can search for a dataset, explore by clicking through the tags and by using our interactive API explorer.

Please also visit the blog to see how others are using our datasets for inspiration.

7. How were the datasets selected? And can I request datasets?

Each dataset is chosen by a Steering Group here in Parliament. The group is comprised of officials from both the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The Steering Group help decide how datasets are prioritised based on public demand and difficulty of providing that dataset.

If you would like to see a particular dataset from Parliament or cannot find what you are looking for then please email us at contactus@ddp.com

8. Will more data become available in the future?

More datasets will be published as resources allow.  We hope that all new datasets produced for internal use by Parliament will be made available as open data on DDP.