Blog post by Alan Howie, Chief Data Officer at Registers of Scotland.

For over 400 years, data in all its forms has underpinned RoS’ core purpose of Registration. RoS holds the oldest national public land register in the world. Many of these historic records are handwritten text-based documents going back hundreds of years. They are a rich source of information but need work to turn them into a format suitable for modern needs. 

We have a strategic objective to deliver more benefits to Scotland by providing innovative and accessible land and property data. This goal is extremely important to us, and we know that we have more work to do to achieve it. Our vision is for RoS to unlock the full potential of its data assets through machine-readable data services, maximising value to the citizens of Scotland, RoS, and its customers.

Currently much of our data work must be done manually by our expert teams. This means that we must get maximum value from our resources and focus on the areas where customers have told us they benefit the most. However, we are working hard behind the scenes to deliver internal and external innovation through a more structured approach to our most important datasets. Reducing human interpretation, maximising automation, and delivering new bulk products, services, and analysis direct to customers. Our work is underpinned by five data principles: 

• Fairness and lawfulness 
• Public benefit and user need 
• Governance and accountability 
• Transparency and openness 
• Practices and standards 

We will deliver our work in three prioritised areas:

• Core: ensuring our core land register information is machine readable data. This will drive automation, increase data insights, and potentially enable new products and services  
• Customer: delivering automated, trusted, low-cost, high-quality data products and services to our customers; and 
• Corporate: improving insights through automated self-service analytics to enhance business intelligence, maximise modelling capability and increase our ability to respond to bespoke requests.  

We anticipate that by the end of 2024 we will have made significant progress towards these goals. We will continue to develop a centralised, managed datastore to house our structured data. This will enable us to increase the breadth of information available to customers as well as the potential use of APIs. This in turn will deliver an improved service to customers who will be able to benefit from easier, more efficient, low-cost data products. We are excited to hit this milestone and the potential that more accessible data can offer to the organisation, our customers and Scotland as whole.