The Gazette is the UK’s official public record, publishing 426,000 notices annually across London, Edinburgh, and Belfast editions. Managed by TSO for The National Archives, it operates as a digital information platform and data service ensuring notices are permanent, searchable, and reusable.
Challenge
Notice data is submitted via multiple users and ingestion routes. TSO needs to convert this into meaningful, accessible data, which is publicly available for reuse.
Solution
Managing Gazette data – TSO manages the ingestion of Gazette notices submitted through multiple channels, including email, web forms, Excel, XML, RDF and APIs. All notices are transformed into XHTML+RDFa, creating content that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The content is enriched with structured data such as postcodes, legislation references and key dates, then validated using RDF-based rules. Multiple versions are securely stored in MarkLogic, ensuring accuracy, resilience and long-term preservation.
Creating structured data – TSO creates high-quality, structured data feeds designed for reuse and integration. Validated RDF data is extracted into a triplestore, enabling semantic querying and advanced analysis. Data is organised longitudinally to support trend analysis and insight over time, rather than isolated snapshots. Standardised REST APIs provide a scalable, interoperable method for accessing Gazette data programmatically, supporting real-time use cases and downstream commercial and analytical applications.
Enabling access and reuse of Gazette data – TSO enables broad access and reuse of Gazette data through multiple delivery routes, including longitudinal datasets, REST APIs and on-site search. Clear, accessible documentation consolidates guidance, metadata and reuse information in a single location, supported by code samples published on GitHub. This approach reduces duplication, promotes transparency and collaboration, and ensures Gazette data remains discoverable, usable and commercially valuable over time for a wide range of users.
Outcome
- A stable service that meets the needs of users.
- The site has seen an increase in visits of 17% against the previous year.
- People using the site downloaded the data that they needed 94,278 times, of which 85,673 were unique downloads.
Made possible through accessible digital channels and easy-to-use APIs.
