Make essential shared data assets available across government
All essential shared data assets (ESDA) must be assessed for data quality issues, made findable and be available through APIs.
To meet this commitment as part of Digital and Data function’s strategic commitments your plans must show how you will make quality essential shared data assets (ESDA) available for use across government.
Essential shared data asset
The full definition of an essential shared data asset is in the essential shared data asset’s policy.
It describes a data set or system which meets the CDDO criticality standard in that it is critical or essential for a cross government service. For example, to meet a legislative requirement, to enable service delivery, for research or for policy formulation purposes.
If you have either created or processed essential shared data assets in the project or the service under review, you must:
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assess it against the government data quality framework
- align with the minimum metadata specification
- use an API which meets the government API standards
The government data quality framework
You must have a clear and documented process for identifying and remediating data quality issues over the full lifecycle of the data set. This might be different to the lifecycle of the project.
You must publish any details of data quality issues and the steps you have taken to remediate them.
The minimum metadata specification
You must publish your metadata to a centrally managed metadata recording system in your organisation. You must have an approach to keeping this metadata updated, either automatically, or if you will be doing it manually, to an agreed schedule.
You must have a plan for full lifecycle management of such data sets, including identifying a data owner and other responsible data roles as described in the government data ownership guidance
Government API standards
Project teams must make new ESDAs available using an API which meets the government API standards.
If it is not appropriate or technically feasible for the project to use an API, you can use an existing trusted government platform to distribute the data.
If you make data available through an API, it must be listed on the API Catalogue regardless of whether it is judged to be an ESDA.
If you’re going through the spend control process you must explain how you’re meeting this commitment if your spend request has been rated high on the risk and importance framework or has an assurance rating of control.
Answering ‘no’ will not lead to an automatic rejection and you will need to explain why your spend cannot align to the commitment.