Bringing data to life
Land Registry by Jonathon Rolande from Pixabay
At the start of November the Land Registry released data about corporate and overseas property ownership in England and Wales. In all there are roughly three and a half million rows of data about commercial and corporate property ownership and a little under one hundred thousand rows of data on overseas property ownership.
That’s a lot of data and we think there are bound to be some interesting stories in there.
Data Unlocked have long had our Schools Finder project that aims to improve the school admissions process here in Birmingham.
It allows you to put your address or post code in and from that it will create a map showing the cut off distances for schools in your area over the previous years. While it can’t tell you for definite that you will or won’t be successful, it helps parents and carers in their decision making by giving an indication of recent trends.
We are currently updating the Birmingham School Finder, so apologies for not being able to link to a live example, our current working copy has data up to 2014 and includes historic trends. It covers both primary and secondary school admissions.
As part of this work we have written a series of Freedom of Information (FoI) requests. We did this after reading and using a fair few local authority school admission documents, comparing the information they contained.Continue Reading
I recently downloaded the Android National Trust app and was disappointed in it in several respects.
It was difficult to use the map to find somewhere to visit, requiring several zoom operations before you can select a place. Unfortunately, once you have got that far, the app crashes.
This lead me to thinking of writing my own app but, as The National Trust is a charity, they are not required to publish data and do not do so. Whilst I am in the process of extracting the data from Wikidata, I thought I would have a look at Listed Buildings. There are a lot of them.
For the past couple of years Data Unlocked have produced a tool to help parents and carers applying for school places for their children in the following year.
It allows you to put your address or post code in and from that it will create a map showing the cut off distances for schools in your area over the previous years. While it can’t tell you for definite that you will or won’t be successful, it helps parents in their decision making by giving an indication of recent trends. You can go to the map by clicking on the image below.
Share-PSI 2.0 is “the European network for the exchange of experience and ideas around implementing open data policies in the public sector”. It consists of 44 partners from 25 countries, including Birmingham City Council. Through my work with the West Midlands Open Data Forum I was invited by Digital Birmingham to attend the kick off meeting in April and then the recent workshop which formed part of this year’s Samos Summit.
The Share PSI Network
The Samos workshop had the title “Uses of open data within government for innovation and efficiency” and consisted of a wide range of presentations, a mini-bar camp and a project meeting. Amanda Smith from the Open Data Institute has already written a post about the workshop and an extensive report of the proceedings has been written up by Phil Archer, the project’s technical co-ordinator from the W3C.
So, instead of a report back, here are just four of the things I took away from the Samos workshop:Continue Reading
We have recently been looking at Planning Application data and how it could best be accessed by programmers to create their own displays or to create plug-ins for Word Press etc.
As such, this is a sort of Request For Comments to find out if we are thinking on the right lines and whether we have missed any vital functionality.
An API implemented as a standard JSON web service using HTTP GET and POST requests.
Last Application:
eg /api/api.php?lastapplication
Returns :
{
"Date": "2014-03-31"
}
Authorities held
eg /api/authorities
Returns :
[
{
"Authority": "Birmingham",
"Count": 2567
},
...
]
By Application number
eg /api/api.php?Birmingham&application=2014/01632/PAContinue Reading
According to The Guardian, this year 70.3% of Birmingham parents/carers “won” a place for their child at their first place secondary school. That’s a pretty good percentage, although it is apparently down by 3% on last year.
At Data Unlocked we’ve being doing work on school admissions, especially in Birmingham, for a number of years now. Following a recent Freedom of Information request we have been able to break down how children from Birmingham get into Birmingham secondary schools, based on the selection criteria.
Birmingham Secondary School Admissions, by criteria, 2013
To clarify: this is children in Birmingham who are offered a place at a Birmingham secondary school. Children from outside Birmingham and Birmingham children who travel to school outside Birmingham, aren’t included in these figures.
From this, we’ve pulled out four interesting facts, or observations:Continue Reading