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UK's Defra dangles £10m as it fishes for help with upgrading Data Services Platform
Suppliers need to support bathing water widgets, among other things
The UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) wants to get to know some tech suppliers able to support its ambition to upgrade its data services platform in a deal which could be worth £10m.
The current platform is used to support a wide range of Defra and third-party applications, from hydrology to fish data. But the department is looking to move to the third generation of the Data Services Platform and has set out to on an "market engagement process" to talk to suppliers who might be able to help out.
According to the prior information notice, the Whitehall department, which spends around £2.6bn a year, is on the hunt for suppliers to help with data integration services, domain registry services, linked data, linked data APIs, metadata catalogue, and so on.
It is also looking for help with applications including APIs and data acquisition, asset data requirements library, asset information, bathing water explorer, bathing water signage, bathing water widgets, catchment data explorer, drinking water, ecology and fish data explorer and flood warning widgets. Cybersecurity and data governance come under its service management requirements.
Defra is responsible for improving and protecting the environment and "aims to grow a green economy and sustain thriving rural communities," it says.
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The Data Services Platform makes environmental data available to a wide range of users in government and external third parties. It is a subdomain of data.gov.uk, but owned by Defra. Data.gov.uk uses the CKAN platform for data publishing, which is hosted in AWS.
The department is adding to the DSP data from Copernicus, Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 satellites under its Analysis Ready Sentinel Data (ARD) project.
"The Earth Observation Data Service aims to facilitate efficient use of earth observation data across the Defra network by providing analysis-ready Sentinel 1 and 2 data and derived products. This website enables users to explore, visualise and download data. It also provides information on accessing and using the data via web services," the department said in its annual report. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
