The Hampshire Hub Beta

The Hampshire Hub Beta

This week sees the launch of The Hampshire Hub in beta. It’s an open, linked data platform which we’ve been helping Hampshire County Council and public service providers around the area to create. And, although there’s more to come on it, the beta is already developing well.

Hampshire Hub Homepage

The Hub is split into three main sections: news, data and area profiles. The homepage spans all three and acts to signpost relevant content from each section, as well as social media activity.

Area Profile Search Box on Hub Homepage

At the core of The Hub is the data section. For this initial release, this is mainly populated with data generated from OSCI data packs, along with some Joint Strategic Needs Assessment documents and maps from Hampshire’s previous prototype hub. There are over 300 datasets, with nearly 200 million facts in all. To make sense of, and generate all this linked data from the source files, we used our open-source Grafter data extraction and transformation tool.

Due to the large volume of data in the hub, our recently developed search feature really comes into its own here. Each section of the site has its own search, returning results from just that area (i.e. news, data and profiles).

Example Table of Data Search Results

But there are other ways into the data too: you can browse by theme, organisation or joint strategic needs assessment. And once you’re at the dataset you need, technical users can enable linked data mode to reveal a variety of machine readable formats and additional metadata.

Linked Data toggle Switch

For a more visual experience, the area profiles section allows you to browse or search for an area and view all the data related to it in a variety of graphs and charts. And if you want to access the source dataset for the visualisation we’ve provided links by each one.

Population Graph Example from Area Profiles

Employment Graph Example from Area Profiles

The Hampshire Hub is a collaborative project at heart – a place where data from over twenty partner organisations can be published, accessed and used. And the project will continue to develop as we build more tools for the hub, as well as more features for our PublishMyData platform on which it is based. Check it out for yourself and let us what you think. You can also read more about the beta in this announcement on the Hub itself.

For now, please send feedback via this form, but we’re planning on setting up a public Github issues tracker for the project soon. Watch this space.