A Life in the UK

Review material. This is exploratory research, not an authoritative service or released data product.

Review A Life in the UK

This is the public learning route for A Life in the UK, an independent open-knowledge demonstrator built with Open Knowledge Format (OKF). It is for people reviewing the idea, the implementation or the evidence. You do not need a background in data, government services or the semantic web.

Explore OKF covers all 293 service-family records in this project's governed denominator. That does not mean every UK public service or every local variation is represented. Records vary in depth; none has named specialist acceptance. Specialist review remains required for 291 records and is not required for 2. Use the linked official source before acting.

Choose how much time you have

Ten minutes: understand the concept

  1. Open Explore OKF.
  2. Search for missed bin and choose Report a missed rubbish collection.
  3. Change Show official routes for between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The nation control emphasises explicitly authored routes; it does not guess from a website address.
  4. Compare the Ordinary episode with its Exception episode.
  5. Open Inspect bundle identity and provenance. Notice that source, authority, evidence, rights and observation time remain visible.
  6. Repeat the exercise with find NHS dentist.

If you prefer to test the data through an AI, use the provider-neutral copy-and-paste prompts. They start with a small HTML catalogue and one complete family record rather than expecting an AI to retrieve the 7.2 MB audit projection in one request. They also include a safe save-and-attach fallback.

The point is not that a person follows every journey in the corpus. The model connects possible life events, needs, services, steps, authorities, jurisdictions, evidence and redress while keeping alternative and exception routes separate.

Thirty minutes: learn the foundations

Read these in order:

  1. The idea and semantic model explains data, information, knowledge and ontology through an everyday missed-bin example.
  2. The complete beginner guide to OKF Explorer is a 22-chapter curriculum, beginning with the product in plain language and progressing through browsers, Markdown, graphs, provenance, responsible AI, building, testing and release governance.
  3. The missed-rubbish journey shows a locally delivered service and complaint boundary.
  4. The learning-to-drive and speeding journey separates Great Britain and Northern Ireland routes and an enforcement exception.
  5. The death, bereavement and estate journey shows national differences, notification boundaries and private dependencies.

Ninety minutes: review the evidence and controls

Continue through these layers:

  1. Ontology — the concepts and governed relationship types.
  2. Jurisdictions — why UK, national and local applicability cannot safely be collapsed.
  3. Evidence and licensing and attribution — what is linked, what is retained and what may be reused.
  4. Evaluation — the competency questions, visible journeys and assurance boundary.
  5. The Claude journey-walker case study — what another AI recovered well, what it misinterpreted and why the governed projection was added.
  6. AI-consumer evaluation — the isolated comparison method and why its incomplete private attempts do not support a published quantitative result, not a performance claim.
  7. Publication governance — exact-byte, manual deployment and real-browser verification gates.

What the public concept contains

The frozen project denominator contains:

The /explore/ interface is a presentation projection of that governed material. It does not invent a cross-family sequence from display grouping, upgrade a normalised assertion to official authority or turn a confidence label into specialist acceptance.

What it deliberately does not claim

This is not:

Source pages were observed at the corpus date. Their content can change, and departmental network policy can block either GitHub Pages or a linked source. Follow the current official source before making a decision.

Designed for managed laptops

Explore OKF is deliberately low-dependency:

It needs JavaScript. The hosted version needs access to github.io, and official links need access to their destination. This makes it suitable for testing on managed laptops, but it is not a promise that every Cabinet Office, HMRC, GDS, Treasury or other departmental configuration will permit it. A department-specific browser and network check remains necessary.

How this was built

The Innovator established the problem, intent, risk boundaries and publication choices. Codex carried out the research, authoring, data modelling, generation, implementation, testing, failure analysis and documentation within those constraints. The work was iterated when security, semantics, accessibility or evaluation evidence exposed a weakness.

That division matters. The demonstrator shows how much disciplined work Codex can complete with light strategic guidance. It does not present AI output as a substitute for publication authority, service-owner judgement, specialist acceptance, accessibility testing or independent evaluation.

Detailed documentation library

The published document index is generated from explicit publication metadata. Adding a nominated repository-authored document does not rebuild the corpus or deploy the site automatically.

Product and delivery

Orientation and worked examples

Meaning, evidence and trust

Evaluation and learning from other AI consumers

The AI comparison stopped after two different provider failures and did not complete the planned matrix. Its answers are not yet bound to immutable runner receipts, so no behavioural or comparative result is published. All 104 questions were used while developing the harness, leaving no untouched test set and no promotion-grade performance claim.

Build, reproduce and publish

The repository remains the canonical source and review history. Generated Explorer JSON, relationship shards, adjacency, search indexes and manifests are projections of authored sources and must not be hand-edited.

Useful terms

Service family : A stable, understandable grouping such as reporting a missed rubbish collection. It is not necessarily one transaction or one provider.

Episode : An authored ordinary or exception route within one family.

Assertion : A stated relationship with its identity, source, authority, evidence, status, scope, observation time and rights.

Projection : A deterministic view generated from governed source material for a specific consumer. It is not a second semantic authority.

Population-complete : Reconciled against this project's declared 293-family denominator. It does not mean exhaustive coverage of all real-world UK services.

Release grade : A later gate requiring named specialist acceptance and other evidence. This demonstrator is not release grade.