A new platform designed to make sense of Wales’s public information landscape launched today.
Edau, the Welsh word for “threads”, allows people to search across information from Wales’s public institutions by topic, place or person.
The ambition is to create one place where people can start with a question about Wales and explore the connections between the people, organisations, decisions and issues behind it.
Edau builds on OpenSenedd, an independent project that tracks and analyses activity in the Senedd and maps it against the Welsh Government’s Programme for Government and relevant government data.
It brings together a growing family of free sites:
- OpenSenedd tracks and analyses activity in the Senedd.
- OpenCouncil.wales records and analyses meetings, decisions and risks across Wales’s 22 local authorities.
- OpenEconomy.wales brings together economic, investment, innovation, procurement and supply chain data.
- OpenCharity.wales collates information about Welsh charities and the people and organisations that fund them.
Edau adds analysis of the board papers of public bodies across Wales and connects this with information from the other platforms.
This means that a search for a particular place, for example, can bring together relevant local authority decisions, Senedd activity, economic information, public sector board papers and organisations operating in that community.
A search for a person or organisation can show where they appear across different parts of Welsh public life. A search for a policy issue can connect political commitments with decisions, funding, economic activity and implementation.
Owen Derbyshire, creator of Edau, said:
“There is an extraordinary amount of information about Wales in the public domain. The problem is that it is scattered across hundreds of organisations, websites and documents, and it can be very difficult to see how the pieces fit together.
“Edau is an attempt to connect those threads.
“The idea isn’t to create more information. It’s to make better use of the information we already have, and make it much easier for people to explore.
“If you are interested in a particular place, person or issue, you should be able to start there and follow the connections across Welsh public life.
“It’s still a prototype, so I’m particularly interested in what people search for, what they find useful and what we’ve missed.”
Edau uses modern data analysis and AI-assisted technology to process and connect large volumes of publicly available information. The focus is on making that information easier for people to find, explore and understand.
Edau is available to the public as a prototype at edau.wales until 23 November. Following the initial testing period, access to Edau will become invitation-only while development continues.
The existing OpenSenedd, OpenCouncil.wales, OpenEconomy.wales and OpenCharity.wales services will remain free and publicly accessible.
