Data Platform

Our Data Sharing Platform is a resilient, scalable and cloud-based solution for publishing data. It hosts data for a wide range of our public and private sector clients, and is available as a fully hosted and managed enterprise solution, or elements can be installed locally on your own infrastructure.

It has been widely used for publishing linked data on data.gov.uk, including data at: data.food.gov.uk, environment.data.gov.uk, location.data.gov.uk, landregistry.data.gov.uk, and many others.

For UK Public Sector clients, we have been awarded a place on GCloud and Digital Outcomes & Specialists Digital Marketplace agreements. See our Digital Marketplace page for more details and links to the services.

Support and maintenance

We offer the platform as a fully hosted and managed service for publishing linked data; In addition, we can install customized elements of the platform on a client’s own infrastructure.

As the system is fully replicated routine maintenance can be carried out without taking the system off-line; there is no need for scheduled maintenance windows when the system is out of service.

Our hosting support for the full system includes all regular maintenance, monitoring and backups. We will provide reports to the clients on the usage of the system – the precise details of the data reported will be agreed with the client during the setup phase. We also provide an incident reporting service. The basic service is available during normal business hours (09.00 – 17.30 Mondays – Fridays, excluding public holidays).

Additional support options are available at extra cost, including telephone support and faster response times.  For such additional support services we offer service credits in the event of failing to meet targets.

The production system we run for the Environment Agency hosts four live services (Bathing Water quality, Flood warnings and river levels, Water Quality Archive, electronic Public Registers) which have averaged 99.998% availability for the last year.

Benefits

Robust, reliable service for publication of sustainable, trusted and usable 5-star data

Adaptive and flexible platform that can be grown to meet your changing needs

Deployment flexibility on the cloud or within your own infrastructure

Provide your partners or customers with integrated, live updates twenty-four hours a day

Helps you to build data integration into your transforming organisation

Deployment flexibility on the cloud or within your own infrastructure

Our Technology

We believe strongly in the use of open standards and open source. Where possible, we release software that we have developed and our team also contribute to a number of open, reusable public ontologies.

Technical Description

The Epimorphics Linked Data Platform is used by the Environment Agency, Land Registry and commercial customers for linked data publication.

It is comprised of:

  • A Linked Data API engine, provided by Epimorphics’ implementation of the LDA (ELDA) or specialised alternatives when needed
  • Text search, provided by Apache Lucene
  • A fully compliant SPARQL 1.1 endpoint, provided by Apache Jena ARQ
  • A scale-out, fault-tolerant runtime platform, hosted in Amazon Web Services
  • An update controller for managing coordinated updates to replicated services
  • Support for converting data from source formats such as CSV to linked data for publication
  • Support monitoring and scaling the underlying cloud infrastructure

The platform architecture has 3 main tiers: load balancing and routing, application services and storage.

Optionally we can provide additional upload mechanisms which will integrate with client’s’ existing workflows to support “business as usual” publication of linked data.

The platform is customisable and can also host applications running on top of the data.

Features

Fully standards-compliant linked data publication platform

Widely used within the UK public sector

Replicated for fault-tolerance and scalability

Entry level service also available

Projects using the data platform

The Land Registry

The Land Registry publish their 5-star open data such as the UK House Price Index (UKHPI) and Price Paid data using our data sharing platform. Rich data explorer and user focused application have been built on top of these data services.

DEFRA & Environment Agency

Supporting their Data Strategy the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and in particular its largest arms length body the Environment Agency publish some of their rich open data services through our data sharing platform.