Simon and I have had a busy couple of days presenting the “Realising the value of data” sessions at the Greater Birmingham Digital Academy Summer School where we explained some of the different ways you can get data from organisations, to which I added this one.
I have a long standing passion for historic buildings and was interested to find that Historic England (English Heritage, as was) provide a data download. I grabbed this (see my previous post) , but was somewhat frustrated to find that the Asset Name was (no doubt due to “historic” reasons) sometimes something like “2-3”. Although an Easting and Northing was also supplied, I couldn’t think of an easy way to convert those to an address.
I emailed them to ask if any further information was available and, somewhat to my surprise, their Mapping and Spatial Analysis Officer replied to me. After a bit of discussion, he agreed to do an extract for the West Midlands and the following day I received two files containing a lot more data.
A swift merge using Google Fusion Tables, and I had a file that already had the Latitude and Longitude and contained much better data.
The moral is “Ask nicely”.
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