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Weeknote #7: w/c 2023-09-25

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Hi all. It’s Simon here again with another weeknote.

This week we had our session at the Data Standards Authority Peer Review Group (PRG)!

What the Peer Review Group does

The Peer Review Group is a collective of data experts from around Government. Its members provide advice to people and projects that want to improve the way Government uses data.

In particular, its members provide help to people choosing or developing an open standard. They ensure that projects have all the guidance and support needed to make best use of their time at the Open Standards Board or DSA Steering Board.

Our slot at Peer Review Group

We presented our Tariff data standards work to PRG this week. As the members are from a broad range of Departments, we first explained what the Tariff is and the history of how we ended up with multiple systems speaking an EU data language.

We then explained why we want to standardise:

  1. TARIC3 is ambiguous in many places and we’d like to fix those ambiguities to make cross-Department collaboration easier
  2. We’ve made some UK-specific decisions about how we’d author our own data and these need to be documented
  3. TARIC3 is a mix of technical stuff and EU data governance – we need the technical content but have to define our own data governance
  4. Decisions about how to manage the data are largely taken by DBT and HMRC and we’d like to involve a wider group of people in the process

Finally, we demo’d some of the work we’ve done so far and provided links to this manual (and our weeknotes!).

What PRG thought of our work

The feedback from PRG was very positive! Everyone in attendance agreed that the work was worthwhile. We were promised some pointers to help make our work even better, such as a connection with the Open Government Partnership and links to the Open Data Institute’s work on data standards.

From here, we’ll attend a meeting of the DSA Steering Group. This is the group that will receive formal advice from the Open Standards Board about whether standardisation is recommended and will actually implement the decision. Tune in next time for an update on how that goes.