Over the last 18 months I've been building a new Data and Information Access team in Defra. The team brings together data sharing and library functions.
Maintaining catalogues of good quality metadata is critical to them all. But over the last few months I've come to realise I have a love/hate relationship with metadata and the hate is winning.
We've opened our new Earth Observation Data Service to users across Defra. This data has the potential to change our understanding of the environment. Andrew Newman explains how this is working and how we are making this data openly available.
Defra deals in data. And lots of it. A big part of the department’s job is to collect, process and, through careful service design, convert data into something useful for citizens, businesses and other agencies.
Let's talk about legacy software. Every large organisation has some. We have plenty. When we say 'legacy', we usually mean software and systems that are old. But old software isn’t necessarily bad software.
We all need to protect personal information, we do this every time we lock our mobile phones, for example. It’s also important that we, as Civil Servants, protect the personal information that others share with us to help us create …
Digital technology has transformed almost every aspect of our lives. A lot has changed over the last 20 years since the last Data Protection Act was passed in 1998. In that year Celine Dion had a chart topping hit with …
The Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) is one of Defra's delivery bodies. It is responsible for safeguarding animal and plant health for the benefit of people, the environment and the economy. Part of its work involves inspecting all sorts …
The law says that companies disposing of waste into landfill sites must have a permit. The permit requires them to monitor various things, so that we understand what impact the site may be having on the environment. The list of …
A blog about the opportunities and challenges in developing digital services for Defra's Livestock Information Programme
April is a busy month in our open data journey, as we make a number of significant flood-related datasets open including: Flood Map for Planning Areas that benefit from flood defences Flood storage areas Flood zones Spatial flood defences (without standardised …
