Post: 8 November 2014
Last year I submitted an unlocking request for open data release of the Parliamentary Registers of MPs’ Interests, Lords’ Interests and All-Party Groups. The Registers are currently available on the Parliament website, but not in an easily accessible or re-usable format.
It’s not clear if the Cabinet Office’s Transparency Team did anything to take this request forward. Parliament is technically outside the scope of the Government’s open data policy initiative. However I know a few journalists have also been agitating for release of the Registers in a format that would make them easier to analyse.
There has now been some movement: yesterday the Data.Parliament project opened up API access to the Lords’ Register of Interests. I understand the MPs’ Register of Interests will be added in the near future.
API access is not quite the same as bulk release of the full datasets, which is what I am arguing for. Bulk release in an accessible format is a prerequisite for proper open data, according to the Open Definition. APIs and linked data are nice to have, but they mainly useful for developers. It’s important that we have bulk downloads as well, particularly for datasets like this that are of broad interest to analysts and the general public.
In the meantime I have compiled a copy of the full current Lords’ Register of Interest by submitting a series of queries to the API and combining the results into a single dataset. I have shared the dataset on Google Drive:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkAX7sP1au8YdDFzeFJzSnZ5S0ttemhhSTNXMVd3YUE
or you can download it as a zipped csv:
http://www.owenboswarva.com/opendata/lordsregisteredinterests_20141108.zip
The Lords’ Register of Interests dataset is re-usable under the Open Parliament Licence.
Image credit: Palace of Westminster, London - Feb 2007 by Diliff (CC BY-SA 2.5)