The Goal

The UK Parliament needed a smart solution that would enable them to provide clear and accessible information. As a representative institution open to the concerns of the electorate, they wanted to ensure citizens and organizations could be informed through the UK Parliament website.

In addition, the Members of Parliament (MPs) needed to be able to easily follow a bill’s progress, which would help them do their work more efficiently.

The Challenge

The pre-existing UK Parliament website and data services were confusing and difficult to use due to outdated technologies, too complex and often duplicated information, non-responsive web design, and poor search capabilities.

They needed an innovative, sector-specific approach to consuming and sharing data so that it would provide MPs, parliamentary staff, and the public with quick, stable, and efficient access to the abundant facts and relationships locked inside the data.

The Solution: A New Data Service Powered by GraphDB

One of the important elements of the UK Parliament’s new data services is the GraphDB Enterprise Cluster, which is easy to set up and has been proven to scale in various production environments.

Thanks to its smooth backup and restore procedures as well as great performance, GraphDB brings the required stability to the system and guarantees its uptime (as proven through benchmarks conducted by the UK Parliament IT architects).

Business Benefits

• Providing clear and accessible information for users on the website
• Enabling UK Parliament staff to do their work more efficiently 
• Compliance with standards and regulations

Why Choose Ontotext?

Ontotext’s semantic graph database allows smooth data integration, visual graph navigation of the stored data as well as cross-enterprise data publishing and consumption. GraphDB is also standards-compliant, which is critical for an organization like the UK Parliament.

The high availability, robustness, and stability of GraphDB enable the UK Parliament data services to remodel the way they manage their data. Both http://www.legislation.gov.uk (later migrated to https://data.gov.uk/) and https://data.gov.uk/ present data that is easily and quickly available for users to get engaged in the work of the UK Parliament or to use for analysis and exploration.

Powered by GraphDB, these services can better address the online needs of MPs and parliamentary staff and reach a larger public with more relevant and connected information.

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