Strategic review of Open Data publishing activity and creation of a developer support strategy.

The British Library have recently been evaluating how to develop their Open Data publishing activities. Increasing developer engagement around use of the British Library’s Open Data has been highlighted as a key area of focus.

In October 2012 I undertook a project to create a Developer Support Strategy for the British Library. The work involved a detailed review of their current Open and Linked Data publishing efforts and the subsequent creation of a roadmap providing recommendations for improvements over both the short and medium term.

The report included:

• How to improve discoverability of the availability and utility of published data
• A structured approach to providing learning support for the developer community
• Suggestions for useful developer tools
• Guidance on approaches for building engagement with developers around data
• Thoughts on how to measure success of a data publishing activity

This report was followed up by some subsequent work to create:

• A short series of developer tutorials, to help drive usage of the British National Bibliography dataset
• An open source demonstration application
• A number of sample SPARQL queries for exploring the BNB Linked Open Data