Take a look at the screen shot below from esd’s open data page for browsing datasets. It lists council datasets published in specified formats for selected service areas.
The page shows a filtered selection of datasets read from different councils’ inventories of open data. Inventories are generated automatically and available for anyone to read from councils which use the latest version of DataShare to publish their open data. Here, for example, are the inventories of Bracknell Forest, Redbridge and Peterborough all in the same machine readable format.
DataShare is being rolled out to councils by CIPFA – see here.
The inventory includes both datasets and the schemas that define their structures, so it’s possible to see schemas used by different councils for each service area. One council can apply another council’s schema if it chooses. Using DataShare it’s a simple process of pointing to another council’s schema to create a local dataset of the same format. The Open Data User Group’s local open data incentive scheme provides a DataShare compatible schema for each of its three themes.
The inventory format was defined in work lead by Peterborough council. Other councils now aim to implement the same schema in open source portals so more councils’ dataset inventories are published in the same way.
data.gov.uk has written a harvester, which is now in beta testing, for the inventory. As soon as the harvester is released, councils which use the inventory can register for automated harvesting so they no longer need to manually add each of their datasets to data.gov.uk.
