A Year of Digital Adventure: building our digital estate

For Wales, 2016 is the Year of Adventure. In this fledgling digital world of ours though, every year is full of digital adventures, where new technologies, services, apps, ideas and people come to the fore.

The prologue to the digital adventure is about the idea that there will be a time after technological development to having an impact, to change the world; a time when Nanotechnology Meets Local History, a time when a global brand can be created through social media, and a time where technology is easy to choose, use, deploy and benefit from.

Some of these things are here and now. Some of these things take more time and more effort than most of us would like. Deciding what commercial technology to use in an ever changing market, and for ever changing users, is very hard. With open source, free, software, the time and resources required to deploy can still be a challenge - and even making a simple choice, which particular piece of software to use, can be a minefield.

Our digital estate is a key aspect of everything that will come next. An organisation or an individual's digital estate is their digital world and it is no less important than physical buildings and architecture or, in a personal sense, the fashions we choose to wear.

The digital estate can and does apply to cultures and countries - and what a fantastic challenge and opportunity it is to build on, and maybe beyond, Andrew Green's and the National Library of Wales' Theatre of Memory and create a truly Digital Wales.

Recently, two fantastic events at Swansea University brought some of this home. Last week the CHERISH-DE launch talked about how the project will develop innovative approaches to digital economy themes relating to humans, society and industry. The range of academics, from Swansea, Newcastle, Bath and others, and the commercial partners including local and global names, was broad and uplifting.

An Adventure in Big Data

Today, at the Swansea University School of Management, Tourism professionals, data scientists and others met to discuss An Adventure in Big Data. This event covered areas such as big data, smarter cities, tourism, and what can happen when viral marketing turns political, turns around, and bites you. With visitors from Spain, Flanders, Denmark, the US and more, this was one of those meetings that had a distinct digital buzz about it. If Swansea University's School of Management can make discussions like this happen across the public and private sectors, then it might just hit on a winning formula.

As a number of the talks at both these events highlighted - the digital world is already here, ignore it at your peril.

Digital Exhaustion

I was just reading an informative piece, as always, by the 1709 blog which summarises the state around digital exhaustion. Not the tiredness of computers, but the way in which digital artefacts can be resold or passed on:

Whether EU law allows digital exhaustion arguably remains however an unresolved issue, with diverging interpretations being provided at the level of national courts. Yet, despite the legal and economic relevance of allowing markets for second-hand digital works, current EU copyright reform plans seem regrettably not to include any consideration of issues facing general digital exhaustion, or its lack thereof.

Which led me onto wondering whether Wales, Welsh Government &c. have any opinion on these matters?

The always interesting 1709 blog can be found here: http://the1709blog.blogspot.co.uk

Stats: Wales data sources

Welsh Overview: http://wales.gov.uk/statistics-and-research/wales-summary/?lang=en

• 3.1 million people (mid 2011).
• The main urban areas are Cardiff (346,100), Swansea (239,000) and Newport (145,700).
• About 1 in 20 of the UK population live in Wales.
• The total land surface of Wales comprises nearly 2.1 million hectares, of which some 80 per cent is devoted to agriculture.
• Life expectancy from birth in Wales is 78.2 years for males and 82.2 years for females (2010-12).5
• Just over 52 per cent of local authority municipal waste was prepared for reuse, recycling or composting in 2012-13.8
• 1,656 maintained schools, and approx 465,000 pupils. More than 500 schools teach through the medium of Welsh.
• There were nearly 129,000 enrolments at higher education institutions in Wales in 2012/13.
• In 2013 there were 9.5 million sheep and lambs about one quarter of the UK total.
• There were around 35,200 babies born in 2012.
• Around one fifth of the population of Wales say they can speak Welsh.
• There were 9.6 million domestic UK tourist trips to Wales in 2012.

Need data on Wales?

Wales Government: http://wales.gov.uk/statistics-and-research/?lang=en
Data Unit Wales: http://www.dataunitwales.gov.uk/data
Stats Wales: https://statswales.wales.gov.uk/Catalogue
Census 2011: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census/key-statistics-for-unitary-authorities-in-wales/stb-2011-census-key-statistics-for-wales.html
NHS: http://www.wales.nhs.uk/statisticsanddata/sourcesofdata
Police: http://data.police.uk

Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym

Dafydd ap Gwilym website: http://www.dafyddapgwilym.net

The editors of the works of Dafydd ap Gwilym included on the site are visualised using Cytoscape. The layout is manually tweaked after being laid out by Cytoscape's algorithms. Raw data can be found here

Turning an Eye to Crime

Turing an eye to crime: South Wales Police crime data.

Cytoscape layout of crime data

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v1.0. UK Crime data