ODI Data Infrastructure, Institutions & Data Access Initiatives

Data that could drive new discoveries or innovation is not always as available as it could be.

make the most of PSREs, which have the potential to deliver broad public policy objectives and help innovation translation enable work across institutions to solve the grand challenges of our time make the most of our institutions, to use research to improve both UK and devolved policy outcomes and to measure and refine programme performance

Crucially, we must embrace the potential of open research practices. First, we will require that research outputs funded by the UK government are freely available to the taxpayer who funds research. Such open publication will also ensure that UK research is cited and built on all over the world. We will mandate open publication and strongly incentivise open data sharing where appropriate, so that reproducibility is enabled, and knowledge is shared and spread collaboratively. Second, we will ensure that more modern research outputs are recognised and rewarded. For example, we will ensure that digital software and datasets are properly recognised as research outputs, so that we can minimise efforts spent translating digital outputs into more traditional formats. Third, we will consider the case for new infrastructure to enable more effective sharing of knowledge between researchers and with industry to accelerate open innovation where possible.

PSREs and other publicly funded research institutes Public sector research establishments (PSREs) and other publicly funded institutes – including UKRI-funded institutes and institutes funded by the devolved administrations, are a diverse collection of bodies carrying out research. This research supports government objectives, including informing policy-making, statutory and regulatory functions and providing a national strategic resource in key areas of research. They can also provide emergency response services. They interact with businesses around a wide array of innovation-related functions. We want to get the most value out of the whole range of PSREs and publicly funded institutes, laboratories and campuses. The current PSRE and institute landscape is complex. There is an opportunity to raise awareness and support development of strategic national laboratory capability, develop closer relationships across the network of PSREs and institutes to address cross-cutting priorities and develop more consistent and co-ordinated, accessible funding for PSREs. Most programmes do not include funding for the full costs of overheads – this sometimes prevents our national laboratories from participating in UK government priority programmes without making a loss. A more flexible approach and funding a higher proportion of the economic costs would increase spending efficiency and encourage more effective investments and maximise their benefits. Building on the 2019 Science Capability Review, we will: champion the development of a truly strategic, national laboratory capability and identify opportunities to strengthen their capabilities and ability to collaborate, especially with the private sector, devolved administrations and local civic authorities work to understand current capacity and capability, including spare capability, and to ensure that national labs, PSREs and other publicly funded institutes are working together as part of business as usual rather than only in times of crisis explore the potential for all PSREs to have access to more funding opportunities from UKRI so that PSREs are viewed as national assets rather than the property of UK government departments

Accreditation is a means of assessing, in the public interest, the technical competence and integrity of organisations offering evaluation services.Accreditation, with its many potential benefits for the quality of goods and in the provision of services throughout the supply chain, underpins practical applications of an increasingly wide range of activities across all sectors of the economy, from fishing to forestry, construction to communications. Independent research has confirmed that accreditation has a positive economic value of nearly £1bn on the UK economy each year. 

The primary goal of external auditing is to determine the extent to which the organization adheres to managerial policies, procedures, and requirements. The independent or external auditor is not an employee of the organization. He or she performs an examination with the objective of issuing a report containing an opinion on a client's financial statements. The attest function of external auditing refers to the auditor's expression of an opinion on a company's financial statements. The typical independent audit leads to an attestation regarding the fairness and dependability of the statements. This is communicated to the officials of the audited entity in the form of a written report accompanying the statements (an oral presentation of findings may sometimes be requested as well).

As a result, the AICPA issued Statement on Auditing Procedure (SAP) No. 1 in October 1939 and it required that auditors inspect inventories and confirm receivables. Consequently, auditors became responsible for auditing the business entity itself rather than simply relying upon management verification routines.

First, in 1961 Felix Kaufman wrote Electronic Data Processing and Auditing. The book compares auditing around and through the computer. Historically, auditing around the computer entails traditional manual procedures in which the existence of automated equipment is ignored. As such, the computer is treated as a black box. In this context, auditors rely upon physical inputs to and outputs from automated devices and do not concern themselves with how processing actually occurs within the system(s). Conversely, auditing through the computer involves actual use of computer systems in testing both controls and transactions. Finally, auditing with the computer entails direct evaluation of computer software, hardware, and processes. Consequently, auditing through the computer or with the computer is able to provide a much higher level of assurance when contrasted with auditing around the computer.

Although some aspects of the traditional audit will continue to hold value, the audit of the future provides opportunities to increase the use of automated tools and remains a key for offering improved assurances relative to the responsible management and utilization of stakeholder assets.

As previously mentioned, basic CAATS contain capabilities to enhance audit effectiveness and efficiency. However, they do not operate on a 24/7 basis and therefore fail to construct a truly continuous auditing environment whereby exceptions and anomalies may be identified as they occur. Alternatively stated, they do not work with real-time or close to real-time data streams and, thus, are not able to address questionable events such as potential fraud or irregularities in an optimized fashion. Cangemi (2010) argues that, given the recent advances in business technologies, the continuing emphasis on the backward looking audit is simply an outdated philosophy. Instead, he believes that real-time solutions are needed.

Future audit approaches would likely require auditors, regulators, and standards setters to make significant adjustments. Such adjustments might include (1) changes in the timing and frequency of the audit, (2) increased education in technology and analytic methods, (3) adoption of full population examination instead of sampling, (4) re-examination of concepts such as materiality and independence, and (5) mandating the provisioning of the audit data standard. Auditors would need to possess substantial technical and analytical skills

The IEEE standard for software development defines an audit as “an independent evaluation of conformance of software products and processes to applicable regulations, standards, guidelines, plans, specifications, and procedures”

This is a repeatedly observed phenomenon in tax compliance auditing, where several international surveys of tax compliance demonstrate that a fixed and vetted tax audit methodology is one of the most effective strategies to convince companies to respect audit results and pay their full taxes

Complex systems tend to drift toward unsafe conditions unless constant vigilance is maintained [42]. It is the sum of the tiny probabilities of individual events that matters in complex systems—if this grows without bound, the probability of catastrophe goes to one. The Borel-Cantelli Lemmas are formalizations of this statistical phenomenon [13],

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), methodical and systematic risk management approach that examines a proposed design or technology for foreseeable failures [72]. The main purpose of a FMEA is to define, identify and eliminate potential failures or problems in different products, designs, systems and services.

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Some serial numbering systems include built in error-checking to deal with copying errors, using a check digit.

The second way of providing unique identifiers is using a name or code.

These are typically still assigned by a central authority, sometimes known as a registration agency, but they are constructed in different ways.

Encoding information about geography and hierarchy within codes can be useful. It can make them easier to validate.

It also mean you can also manipulate them,

But encoding lots of information in identifiers also has its downsides. The main one being dealing with changes to administrative areas that mean the hierarchy has changed. Do you reassign all the identifiers?

some identifier systems look at reducing the burden on that central authority.

federated assignment. This is where the registration agency shares the work of assigning identifiers with other organisations.

Another approach to reducing dependence on, and coordination with a single registration agency, is to use what I’ll call “local assignment“.

A simplistic approach to local assignment is “block allocation“: handing out blocks of pregenerated identifiers to organisations which can locally assign them.

Here the registration agency still generates the identifiers, but the assignment of identifier to “thing” is done locally.

A more common approach is to use “prefix allocation“. In this approach the registration agency assigns individual organisations a prefix within the identifier system.

One challenge with prefix allocation is ensuring that the rules for locally assigned suffixes work in every context where the identifier needs to appear.

In distributed assignment of identifiers, anyone can create an identifier. Rather than requesting an identifier, or a prefix from a registration agency, these systems operate by agreeing rules for how unique identifiers can be constructed.

A hash based identifier takes some properties of the thing we want to identify and then use that to construct an identifier.