Community

Yes this is the same initiative as the Cabinet Office IDA programme. However the delivery is being managed in a variety of ways. Department of Business Innovation and Skills is one of the implementation strands of the overall programme which is why they are quoted in this article. An additional four strands from different Goverment Departments make up the initial implementation phase of the programme. This is in line with the ICT Strategy and the devolved Crown responsibilities which now exist for the delivery of IT systems into government.

Presumably a convenient means of MPs battling on another front with the banks, or possibly another innovate message to the industry. Either way it is likely to take up more time and money as MPs get involved in the Payments Council, with no gain to the customer.

Loved Dave B's history lesson in payments though.

As the lovely Liz Lum has me on her FinGodessTech list my favourite today is of course a data related one, from the marvelous websci guys at Southampton.

Nigel Shadbolt explains that they have made the earth shattering decision to abandon the RDF format for Linked Data, and move to PDF for all their data. He even posts a visualisation backed up by Google search data explaining why the decision was inevitable.

Here is the link if you would like to read it for yourself.

http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/data/2011/04/01/pdf-selected-as-interchange-format/