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/ _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
