New Year, New Data

I am continuing to analyse open data on Scottish communities. We couldn’t find some of the data that we wanted in an open source form, so we have been collecting it manually to add to the mapping. 

It’s been quite a journey. We’ve had some interesting conversations, including with Ian Watt of Open Data Scot and with Graham Hogg from Lateral North.

One hurdle that Ian pointed out is the blanket copyright statement on most local council websites, which prevents anything on their websites from being published. This means that we’ve had to collect information on community spaces from other places manually, such as Google - we had to improvise because of the lack of open data provision.  With improvisation comes risk - the community spaces dataset may contain some information that is out of date.

Another hurdle is primary school data. We added it into the data mapping as primary schools are often a community hub of activity. However, upon including primary school locations on the maps, when we checked, we realised that the coordinates were not accurate enough. This meant that primary schools could appear in the wrong intermediate zone which affected the results. 

There is a growing data community in Scotland and it has been fascinating getting to grips with it and learning about some of the benefits and challenges involved with working with open data.

We will be tracking the learning from this project in a forthcoming policy briefing on about open data and how far we have to go as a country to ensure we can use data to build a Scotland of better places.