ONS Digital

Croeso/welcome to this week’s round-up of activities from Digital Publishing which is now in its tenth week (surely a cause for celebration).

Last week focused on finalising and launching our new infographic guidelines which were produced by Robin Richards of Ripetungi in consultation with data visualisation and design experts at the ONS.  Over the past year, ONS has been using infographics to help tell stories with our data in an easy to understand and shareable format. As a result of the increased usage of infographics as a presentational tool, Digital Publishing commissioned a set of guidelines to help improve the quality and consistency of the infographics being produced. It is hoped that over time the recommended process will help staff involved in presenting outputs to ask the right questions, make better decisions at key points within the process, ultimately saving them time and improving the end result.

So far so good, no real uproar from the business, most have welcomed the guidance as there was a real uncertainty as to what qualified as an infographic and what was acceptable. I am sure that once the dust settles, comments will start to pour in but until then we’ll enjoy the silence.

Other news

It’s all go in our Business Change and Implementation team with attendance at a conference help improve business analyst skills and creation of standards for Description and Search Keyword metadata, as part of the Metadata Standards Project due to be finalised in the coming weeks. Improving our metadata is a major element of the ongoing work to improve the site search – so it is vital work.

A couple of months ago we sent out a couple of surveys to various aother National Statistical Institutions (NSI’s) for comparability study  focusing on their digital publishing processes and platforms. These have been completed now and the team have extracted them from Survey Monkey and the analysis will begin shortly. The results should make interesting reading (for us at least!).

Linked data was also on the agenda this week. This branch of the ‘semantic web’ has been growing in importance in recent years alongside the growing focus on ‘open data’. There is an interesting pocket of work going on in this field within the ONS – I can’t really talk about it yet but it is very much an example of the way things are going and what we should be thinking about.