Getting the COGS moving
Connected Open Government Statistics (COGS), formerly referred to as the GSS Data project, is something our community has been working on for the last couple of years. The timing is right for the project to finally leave the nursery slopes, and we now need more people to work with us to complete the next phase.
The project has so far run a Discovery and an Alpha phase. We firstly looked to understand if our users wanted us to connect data from across our statistical service and, with this validated, into the technical feasibility of the project.
We found that we could indeed build a service that joins statistics together, so that answering thematic questions, across outputs of multiple departments, is both feasible and vital.
This, in many ways, was the easy bit. We built a prototype, showing what the approach might look like for trade data. In it, you can see glimpses of what might be possible, but also just how big an undertaking this could be. We used a range of tools and processes, loosely held together to create an ever-evolving pipeline of data modelling, processing and linking. We now need to scale it to include more data, faster, and with a wider range of links to really start to tell the story of our society.
The challenge is massive. We want to make our statistical data better for people, machines and the web. I am pleased to say that the project has recently secured a modest investment from partners across our statistical service to allow us to progress the work further.
Bringing government statistics together from all over the UK into a single format is an exciting prospect. It opens up many possibilities for what we and our users can do; from finding data more simply, allowing analysts and researchers to do their work with fewer distractions, to applications that deliver innovation and insight to bring about positive societal change.
This means we are now hiring. We need enthusiastic, dynamic, creative people. People passionate about change. People willing to challenge the norm and find solutions. We need people to translate the large number of processes into meaningful, common approaches, by understanding a broad range of statistics and departmental policies.
The following vacancies are now available:
Contact us for further information: ons.resourcing@ons.gov.uk