Open Data Communities
Open Access to Local Data
This site is the UK Department for Communities and Local Government's official Linked Open Data site.
It provides a selection of statistics on a variety of themes including Local Government finance, housing and homelessness, wellbeing, deprivation, and the department's business plan as well as supporting geographical data.
All of the data is available as fully browsable and queryable Linked Data, and the majority is free to re-use under the Open Government Licence.
Onwards and Upwards!
On Sunday, the 14th of April 2013, we upgraded the previous OpenDataCommunities proof-of-concept, introducing a more powerful and robust service platform and various new and improved features.
This change affected some data and APIs, so you may need to update any code which relies on them.
Getting Started with the data
Get Started by choosing a theme, and browsing from there. Each dataset has a webpage with details of its contents and how to use it.
The data is browsable by type within datasets. Datasets themselves are collected into broad themes.
All data |
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Themeeg: Housing |
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Dataseteg: Homelessness decisions |
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Resource typeeg: Observation |
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Resourceeg: 2011 Q3, Tunbridge Wells, decision: accepted |
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Licensing
All of the DCLG datasets on this site are available under the terms of the Open Government Licence. We also include some other supporting datasets, notably Administrative Geography and Postcodes from Ordnance Survey. Please check the individual datasets for details.
Accessing the data
The data is provided as Linked Data, via this browsable website as well as in multiple machine-readable formats including JSON, RDF, Turtle and N-triples. The available formats are indicated at the foot of each page.
A SPARQL 1.1 endpoint is provided, and complete (zipped) downloads of each dataset are available as N-triples. See the dataset pages, like this one.
For full details of how to programatically access the data in this site, please read our
Developer Documentation.
About
As outlined in its Open Data Strategy, the Department for Communities and Local Government is committed to routinely releasing its data outputs in fully open, accessible and re-usable forms. OpenDataCommunities is the foundation and platform to achieve this objective.
This site upgrades the previous proof-of-concept service. As at April 2013, we have introduced various key, "under the bonnet" changes including more a powerful and robust architecture, and enhanced (open source) software components. This initial release provides a solid footing for a range of exciting new data-browsing and discovery tools that we will introduce in the coming months. Full details of what's changed.
Alongside that, we will be publishing and continue to maintain an ever growing volume of new data. We want you, our users, to help shape and direct our forward plans for new tools, and new datasets. Get involved via our public Google Group or by emailing ODC@communities.gsi.gov.uk.
This section is a showcase of applications and visualisations using the data from this site. If you have something that you'd like us to feature here, please get in touch.
Use the links below to browse the featured apps:
Business Plan Indicators Dashboard
Local Authority Dashboard
Wellbeing Map Explorer
Deprivation Map Explorer
Business Plan Indicators Dashboard
This dashboard enables users to see how the department is performing against key indicators in priority areas.
The data on the dashboard widgets and detail pages is pulled in 'live' from the OpenDataCommunities APIs. This data-driven approach means that as new data arrives for the indicators in the data store, the dashboard is automatically kept up to date.
Additionally, the dashboard widgets can be easily embedded into any website or blog by copying and pasting a little bit of JavaScript. As the widgets pull in data directly from the data store, figures will always be kept current.
Local Authority Dashboard
The Local Authority Dashboard allows you to view a selection of the data that we hold about Local Authorities via a series of charts and maps.
You can search for a Local Authority by entering a postcode, or browse by name. For each figure, there are links to the source data point(s) in the database, from which they are derived.
The dashboard is not intended to be an authoritative or exhausive representation of the data: it provides an introduction to the types of data we hold, and additionally serves as documentation and inspiration to developers of other visualisations or applications.
Wellbeing Map Explorer
The Wellbeing Map Explorer allows users to explore, on a draggable map, how people in different areas of the country rate their subjective wellbeing. For each county and unitary authority, the data was taken from the Office for National Statistics Annual Population Survey. Below county level, the likely degree of variation in wellbeing between neighbourhoods is modelled from the APS using ACORN.
Deprivation Map Explorer
The Deprivation Map Explorer uses the Index of Multiple Deprivation Dataset along with the LSOA boundaries to plot and colour-code the deprivation values on a draggable map.
- This page is available as
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