[Talk-GB] Kent Open Data, KCC

[TimSC]

Hi all,

I met people from Kent's OpenKent, which is a county council open data 
initiative [1][2]. They explained their work and I told them about 
openstreetmap and its community. They said Kent is not as well developed 
in open data as some councils but they have a long term commitment to 
improvement. They have some data sets available but they seem to be 
mainly concerned with expenses, census data and school expenditure so 
far. They said they are seeking ideas of what data to publish because 
they need to prioritize their effort in getting the data for which there 
is a public demand. If you have ideas, I suggest you get in touch. I 
expect other councils have already done stuff that's interesting and it 
might be worth making them aware. They also plan to showcase interesting 
data visualisations based on their data or any Kent related data. It 
might be good to get publicity for small projects. OpenKent is also 
seeking ideas and feedback for a (web based?) data visualisation tool 
they are planning to help the (non-technical) public use the data.

I tried to think of data that would be useful to mappers. Obviously the 
rights of way data would be amazing. The council also holds the parish 
boundaries data. Some government data sets use parish and electoral 
boundaries as their areas, so that would be useful to do visualisations. 
Also the Kent Heritage Tree Project [3] might like the parish 
boundaries, as apparently many old trees are on or near these 
boundaries. Having lists of public institutions, possibly with 
addresses, would be great to validate the OSM database. We can quickly 
find any schools, public services that we missed. I suspect we will 
avoid doing imports of data which is not really GIS but we might add 
data to OSM to make visualisations and mash ups easier (machine tags and 
data to link to their database rows).

Again, they said they would appreciate any ideas. I talked to Noel Hatch 
and Matthew Kerr. Get in touch with them. :)

Regards,

TimSC

[1] http://www.kent.gov.uk/your_council/open_data.aspx
[2] http://openkent.blogspot.com/
[3] http://kentheritagetrees.btcv.org.uk/