We don't have to wait five years for a standards agreement - we can get on with the job today.

We're looking here at how we might relate a particular council's data to this universal schema and we can see that their set of data doesn’t store as many attributes as the universal schema but at least we're capturing all the data that they do have and we can start using it today, which is really critical.

Then if we look down we can see that the design life has been linked down to the design life here, so if we want to make new connections, we can literally just cross over and say we'll find the appropriate mapping of category to whatever name that has in the existing system. These individual lines tell us when something is uniquely identified and sometimes what they think is a unique identifier is also used by another council, and we might need more than one connection to identify that this data is the same data as we've already got.

And if it's changed, we need to update it, or if it's not there, we need to be deleted and so forth. It might be an hour to set up drawing these lines from one thing to another, or adding functions in between them to convert data but once it's done that data connection is set, so any new files I bring in will automatically get transferred through this mapping to the standard.

They can log into this system and see their data and everyone else's data from other councils all in one standardized format and ask that question, like how many kilometers of concrete pipe greater than this dimension have we got in this soil type across the whole country, because we've found a problem and we should focus on digging that up.

One of the critical aspects is there is no huge demand to change what anyone's doing today. We don't have to wait five years for a standards agreement, we can actually write a standard and get on with the job today.

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