I’d be really interested to talk more about anything you are doing on youth-activity related questions. It would be interesting to see what datasets might help here – as, so far as I’m aware, Plings and Parent Know How are the only government (owner or sponsored) data sources with any reasonable coverage of data on activities – and then the coverage is still problematic…

Many other questions could be investigated.

Yes it is about the sort of things the http://www.plings.net project is listing but from a different direction. It is not about the immediate, what can a person do today but about understanding the long term effect that access has. I think what the social science community is trying to understand is impact. They suffer from small survey issue. If we can use technology to build a systematic picture of opportunities for youth and maintain it over time then we can understand how it’s provision helps social need.

So a good research question might be, in a recession if we cut spending on services what is the social impact. We could use the UK government admin data as a backbone for understanding this.

Thanks for pointing out OpenPSI. Looks very interesting in deed – I shall investigate more soon.

Re: the request around Youth Activities – where can I find more on that? Is that activities as in ‘Positive Activities’ – i.e. the sort of things the http://www.plings.net project is looking at?

I thought you might be interested in OpenPSI, a collaboration between the University of Southampton and the UK government, lead by the National Archive, to trial a new form of community provisioned information service.

we are trying to spark interaction between government information providers, academic researchers and information intermediaries, specifically to bridge the gap between those researchers who may not have all
the technical skills or data knowledge to answer important research questions.

We are exposing UK government data in the Semantic Web standards, RDF. We have SPARQL end point so data mashers can issue via query requests. This is a form of open API that allows mashups to be created quite quickly.

There is a current request for information dealing with all forms of data about youth activities which we may try and satisfy.

what audience would you like to address by your blog : young people, your friends, collegues…
Thank you very much for your cooperation
have a nice day

Andrea Miklovicova
andreafmaatgmaildotcom