The National Data Library and the ‘interoperability imperative’

Interoperability and the planned National Data Library were prominent topics in a half-day conference, Cyber Physical Infrastructure: Future Forum, held at Digital Catapult in London on 31 March 2025. The event concluded a series of 2024 workshops and resulting reports published by the National Cyber-Physical Infrastructure (NCPI) ecosystem programme (see nima news, 7 February 2025). This news update shares some of the key topics discussed in the forum.

National Data Library

The creation of a National Data Library (NDL) was a commitment contained in the Labour Party’s 2024 general election manifesto. It aims to “bring together existing research programmes and help deliver data-driven public services, whilst maintaining strong safeguards and ensuring all of the public benefit.” A useful Open Data Institute blog post says the NDL concept builds on a May 2024 proposal by the Onward thinktank calling for “a British Library for Data”. This positioned the NDL as a centralised mechanism for the UK government to become a provider of data for Artificial Intelligence (AI), enabling technological and economic growth. The ODI felt it would: “likely involve creating a more interoperable and accessible data infrastructure across government, enabling safer and easier data access, which delivers social and economic benefits.”

The ODI blog post mentions other NDL proposals (including a Connected Places Catapult vision for a decentralised NDL, building on lessons learned from other data sharing infrastructure projects), before talking about key prerequisites, including:

• open, interoperable standards and technologies to share and safely access data
• clear governance structures that are conducive to innovation while maintaining public trust (data stewardship)
• individual and community controls over how their data is used and by whom, and
• high-quality datasets, curated from across existing government departments, research programmes and beyond

Proposals for national data libraries are not new. From a built environment perspective, for example, …

• several commercial BIM object libraries were developed to help designers and specifiers access manufacturers’ data (nima, as the UK BIM Alliance, supported the IET project, Digitisation for construction product manufacturers – a plain language guide, published in 2021, intended to help manufacturers structure and share data safely and sustainably).
• nima’s GIIG subsidiary described the concept of an organisation-level reference data library (RDL) as a key module of its Information Management Platform approach in 2022, and is currently considering how a pan-organisational national RDL might be developed to aid standardised information approaches.
• in June 2023, the Scottish Futures Trust and the Construction Innovation Hub proposed a free-to-access national metric library holding quantitative and qualitative performance metrics to support clients and industry in assessing the performance of design, delivery, operation, and disposal of assets (read 9 June 2023 BIMplus article).
• following the 2017 Grenfell disaster and the subsequent public inquiry, digital product passports and a National Construction Library holding construction product information have been proposed in a recent Green Paper (read 27 February 2025 BIMplus article), with consultation open until 21 May 2025.

Looking ahead

Attendees at the NCPI Ecosystem event came from a wide range of industry sectors (aerospace, defence, law, automotive, maritime, utilities, local and central government, etc) as well as the built environment, and heard a keynote from John Gall (head of data economy and innovation at the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology). He talked about the Data Use and Access Bill currently going through Parliament (see nima news, 24 October 2025), the UK Government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan and DSIT’s recent Technology Adoption Review.

Looking ahead, Gall said a forthcoming white paper would detail eight sector plans responding to the Government’s industrial strategy, each with data access elements (maintaining security and privacy while enabling international data flows). He identified public sector data as an enabler of growth (with the National Data Library a key engine), and said that, as businesses weren’t doing enough with their data (a later speaker said “only 14% of businesses are sharing data outside their business“), creating a data-sharing infrastructure is becoming more important, adding the “interoperability imperative is coming through very strongly“.

The event included three panel discussions, and interoperability figured prominently in all three, with several positive mentions of the March 2024 Interoperable Europe Act as a model for the UK. The vital components of a data-sharing infrastructure were given as:

1. Business case (for example, the National Underground Asset Register, NUAR, delivers £460m in economic growth benefits, plus safety benefits at no extra cost)
2. Governance (including data governance)
3. Legal requirements (“the problem is not usually the data, or the technology – the challenge is the license for sharing data”)
4. Data interoperability (“it’s a socio-technical issue – don’t break the siloes, connect them!”)
5. Security and trust (“I’ve seen good collaborative contractual arrangements destroyed by poorly applied data-sharing”)
6. Use and value (“have a data-sharing community that can share practical lessons”)

nima perspective

The UK built and managed environment sector cannot work unilaterally on these matters – “system of systems” thinking was mentioned several times at the NCPI event – and practitioners can learn much from what has been proven in other sectors, both domestically and internationally. Nima will continue to monitor developments relating to interoperability and the National Data Library while also seeking to engage with interested organisations such as those involved with the NCPI ecosystem. And its detailed work on the ongoing Information Management Initiative will seek to collate and apply wider pan-sectoral learning to the practical needs of organisations primarily engaged in the built and managed environment.