Welcome to Defra Data Services Forum

PublishMyData (PMD) is a software application in use across the DSP Linked Data services. It consists of a triple store, a user interface for browsing, searching, filtering, and downloading data, and a collection of APIs for accessing data programmatically. This guide is intended to show users how to access datasets stored in PublishMyData.

How to find a dataset

(A dataset is a collection of data. Some datasets are datacubes, which is a specific structure used for statistical dataset, but is still a type of dataset.)

Datasets that are in PMD are accessible through environment.data.gov.uk by going to the search box. Search for ‘milk’. The monthly and annual statistics on milk prices are linked datasets. Click on the dataset link (circled below) and you are taken to that dataset within PMD.

Alternatively go straight to: https://environment.data.gov.uk/linked-data/datasets and select the dataset tab

Enter a keyword search term. At this point, you can use the dropdown menu to select more information about them (such as publisher / licence). 

Once that’s chosen, click on ‘add columns’ and another column, with those details, will appear next to the dataset title. In this example the publisher is noted next to the dataset titles, because that was my dropdown menu selection.

Select the dataset of choice by clicking on its blue hyperlink title

How to filter a dataset

At your chosen dataset, above the columns and rows view, is a box which contains a filter option. The default here is not to show the filters, but switching the toggle to 'show' will display the different dimensions in the data.

Go to the dimension you would like to filter. For example, if you only want data for a specific time period, then in the 'time' row, there is a change button (highlighted here in the red circle). Select that.

In this example, this takes you to a view of all the time periods which you can choose to filter. Select those that you want to include in your dataset, by clicking in the box for that time period. Please note, if you want to filter within the other dimensions, it's the same path - go to the change button, click on that and then select what you want to view from the information shown.

Once you're happy with your selections, click 'apply'. This will return you to the dataset. In our example, the dataset will now show the time periods you've chosen, and not others.

How to download data

Once you've filtered to the data you want, you can download by going to the download tab on the right (above the columns view of the data)

You then have the option to download this as a csv file, which can be opened into Excel or google sheets; other software like R, python, javascript, and visualisation tools like Tableau or PowerBI. Click on the Tidy Data button and it will download your filtered dataset.

To download the data in RDF form, select the Linked Data button.

To explore Defra's linked data, go to https://environment.data.gov.uk/. For enquiries about the data, or to talk to the team about your data, please Submit Feedback/Report an issue.