James O’Malley takes a look at the National Data Library:

That’s why everyone from the Minister downwards is talking about what the platform ‘could’ do in the future – and, I assume, why the NDL programme was given £100m last year. That implies something more ambitious than an updated website.

And it’s possible to imagine plenty of futures for the NDL. Could it become the front door to Trusted Research Environments, that does let researchers poke around inside sensitive public sector data, a bit like the excellent OpenSafely?

Or could it become the gateway to government data not just for the human data nerds, but for the AI bots? One idea I particularly like is this proposal by the Open Data Institute, which pitches that the NDL’s job should be wrangling government data into a format so that AI agents, acting autonomously, can access public sector data. This will be particularly important in the future – as government data can provide valuable ground-truth information, that will make AI chatbots and agents more reliable.

And this brings me to what I think is perhaps the biggest missed opportunity with the NDL launch so far – and that’s the government not giving DSIT some form of enforcement power to oblige other government departments and public sector bodies to open up their data where they can, and set the standards for how it should be released.