The Government Digital Service (GDS) has revealed an initiative bringing data science and user-centred design disciplines together in a GOV.UK Data Labs service.

In an official blog, senior product manager Ganesh Senthi explained that it has been set up to help the public sector make better use of anonymised data in how services are provided through the GOV.UK website.

The goals is to help optimise content and user journeys, ensure that teams across government deliver relevant access to anonymised performance data, explore the idea of consent based personalised experiences on GOV.UK, and to help spread data insights.

The GOV.UK Intent and Feedback Explore Tool (GIFT) will bring together disparate sources of feedback - both qualitative and quantitative - using natural language processing and machine learning to categorise, theme and present trends in feedback for a web page, service, group of services or topic.

This was prompted by the volume of feedback from users needing to interact with government because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile, govGraph will show how various entities relate to each other and bring out new patterns in the data. The goal for this year is to produce a dynamic representation of GOV.UK content, augmented with metadata, structured data and cross-domain service analytics content.

The other initiative aims to enrich and structure around 450,000 attributes on the website in order to develop a corpus of government terms and a semantic graph that can be added to govGraph and used more widely across GOV.UK.

Senthi stated: "We’ve identified many opportunities where this technology could be applied, including question answering, supporting GOV.UK content with search engines and other third parties, cross-platform sharing of our content, and as an analytical tool for disciplines like content and service design across government."

He added that there are also plans to increase the size of the team, develop ideas around solving problems, and build up the infrastructure needed to improve the site.

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