Interim report: A Transparency Tool to Show Data Flows and Stoppages Behind the Scenes
This is one of a series of interim reports produced as part of the Information Sharing Project in collaboration with The Promise Scotland. This project has sought to understand the legal, cultural, and technical barriers to data and information sharing as it relates to care experienced children, young people, and their families across public sector agencies and organisations in Scotland.
This work package was prepared by Dr Yang Lu, from Loughborough University, and focuses on the development of a Transparency Enhancement Tool using semantic ontology to help visualise data flows, stoppages, and organisational dependencies. The tool was developed as a feasibility exercise, testing whether ontology-based modelling could provide a clear, structured way to surface how data moves (or does not move) across services.
The completion of this tool provides a solid foundation for supporting other parts of this project. The ontology tool, underpinned by The Promise data map, will act as a shared framework to support dependent areas of work, including using the ontology to visualise data journeys and key interactions on a single page, demonstrating secure, GDPR-compliant service journeys and multi-party data sharing scenarios in the sandbox, and supporting the development of a DPIA template by mapping data flows, risks, and mitigations across organisations.
The data flows developed here have fed into another workstream of this project, enabling the team to design visually clear data flow diagrams that use simple iconography and consistent visual language to make the complex data journeys easier to understand.
The findings presented here should be read alongside insights from the other work packages, as together they contribute to a shared and evolving understanding of how data and information sharing can better support care experienced children and young people in Scotland. The full set of final project outputs is due to be published in spring 2026.
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The development process involved translating complex, often implicit service interactions into a formal semantic model made up of classes, relationships, and rules. This work was carried out iteratively and in close collaboration with The Promise Scotland’s technical leads and subject-matter experts, ensuring that the model reflected real-world practice rather than abstract theory.
A key design choice was to begin with a composite story, developed by the Independent Care Review in partnership with children, young people, their families and carers to reflect their experiences. This grounded the ontology in lived service interactions, helped prioritise the most meaningful relationships, guided modelling decisions, and ensured the resulting semantic logic reflected how data sharing is actually experienced in practice.
The resulting ontology acts as a conceptual demonstrator. It shows how data flows can be extended, restricted, or stopped based on factors such as role, delegation, sensitivity, and organisational boundaries. Even without further technical development, the tool offers a structured way to prompt discussion around transparency, governance, and service redesign, helping bring hidden assumptions and friction points into view.
The work also surfaced practical challenges. Judgements were needed to balance useful detail with avoidable complexity, and some familiar service concepts did not translate neatly into formal ontology structures. While the model supports exploring hypothetical scenarios, its usability would be significantly enhanced by a visual interface or ongoing technical support.