The LGA promotes an open and transparent local government to meet local needs and demands. It encourages a sector-led approach to open data and fosters the learning and sharing through the "Making open data work for you" initiative.
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Many local authorities increasingly release open data in meaningful and innovative ways and engage with local groups to make better use of it. This page shares some examples of open data use in local authorities. If you do not find what you are looking for, please get in contact
Case studies
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Local open data projects
Local government received £2.64 million in grant funding through the open data breakthrough programme and incentive scheme between 2013 and 2015 to support authorities in releasing and making use of open data. Evaluation reports of some of the projects have been published below which provide examples of open data use and publishing practice. See more here
For further information about the local transparency programme contact [email protected] or visit www.local.gov.uk/local-transparency
| Lead organisation | Project | Description | Year | Report |
| Babergh and Mid Suffolk District Councils | Releasing Data for All | A collaborative programme involving several authorities within Suffolk to make various datasets held throughout the county accessible to all. | 2014/15 | |
| Cambridgeshire County Council | Cambridgeshire Insight Open Data: Stimulating Economic Growth and Encouraging Innovation. | Building on the Cambridgeshire Insight project by developing a new, open methodology that will unlock unpublished datasets to enable local companies, community groups and individuals to plan and then respond to the challenges created by rapid growth. | 2013/14 | |
| Carlisle City Council | Open Business Rates Data | Provision of open access to real time information about Business Rates held by Carlisle City Council | 2014/15 | |
| Cheshire East Council | URIs for natural neighbourhoods | A public interface for defining geographical areas at neighbourhood level, other than formally supported administrative or census output areas. | 2013/14 | |
| Cheshire East Council | Open flexible geographies | Provision of a tool to publish non-official geographical areas individually and in hierarchies as open data with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) associated with their shapes and other properties. | 2014/15 | |
| City of York Council | York Open Data – Empowering communities to access services | A service directory and search tool made available for free under the Open Government License will allow communities and community groups to reuse and combine the data in different ways without a high level of technical knowledge. | 2013/14 | |
| City of York Council | Automated Structure of the Managing and Publishing of Open Data | To provide an infrastructure within the existing Public Services Network that will enable City of York Council to automate the collection, data quality checks, and data formatting to facilitate release of open data. | 2014/15 | |
| Derby City Council | Enabling Local Authority Assets Information | Provision of comprehensive, high quality, up-to-date information on local authority owned land and property assets | 2014/15 | |
| Devon County Council | Local Government Community Data – opportunities for localities and businesses | Working with communities, businesses and IT experts find what data are most required and how best to make them useful to communities and business. | 2013/14 | |
| Hampshire County Council | Linked Open Data Planning Register | Development of planning portal, including schema and open source tool to enable collating, publishing and visualising of linkable planning data. | 2013-15 | |
| Kent County Council | Powers and Duties: Local government legal and business guidance as open data | Publish legal powers and duties as open data under which each English local government service is delivered. | 2013/14 | |
| Lancashire County Council | Lancashire Local Information Service (LIS) Project. | To publish reportable, statistical and other information from the authority and partners through a local information system. Release initially of datasets which are of relevance to communities and business. | 2013/14 | |
| Leeds City Council | Development of the West Yorkshire Observatory | Continued provision and development of the West Yorkshire Observatory to publish spatial data for five local authorities to a wide range of users. | 2013/14 | |
| Leeds City Council | The Data Mill | To release Open Data and make improvements to the Data Mill to derive the most value out of the data use within Leeds. Xpand dashboard and create widget hub | 2014/15 | |
| Leicester City Council | The automation of the publishing of Open Data and internal MI data in a standard, machine readable, linked format | To provide an infrastructure to enable Leicester to automate the production and provision of open data. The project builds on existing technology and partnership which was established for sharing data. | 2013/14 | |
| Local Government Association | Local Government Open Data Incentive Scheme | The local government open data incentive scheme was established as a pilot to publish local government data to consistent open format to create a national view of the data. | 2014/15 | |
| London Borough of Barnet | Barnet Data Store | Design of open source data portal around users and according to open data strategic priorities; deployment of data platform for publishing Barnet's open data sets and technical training. | 2014/15 | |
| London Borough of Harrow | ProClass Spend Classification Standard | To publish and support the Proclass procurement classification system as part of the local government standards on LGInform+ | 2014/15 | |
| London Borough of Harrow | Hot Harrow | An investigation using GIS technology into the thermal properties in the London Borough of Harrow. Outputs thermal and height imagery as well as building footprints. Data to be openly reusable. To aid service delivery, environmental projects, open data and detection of unsafe dwellings. | 2013-15 | |
| London Borough of Hounslow | Customer Data Gateway | The development of a cloud-based open data portal to support the expansion of the London Borough of Hounslow's open data work and role as regional leaders in the field of open data. | 2013-15 | |
| London Borough of Lambeth | Cooperative Council Community Data Project | A freely shared open source platform that will embed data and tools "where the conversations are taking place" on more citizen facing sites giving the local community and third party organisations better access to information and enable them to work with the council on designing and delivering improved services across the borough. | 2013/14 | |
| London Councils | Intelligent London: Skills Match | Skills Match will bring skills data and labour market data together and analyse it to enable policy-makers, practitioners and employers to take an intelligence-led, geographically specific approach to addressing youth unemployment in London. | 2013-15 | |
| Norfolk County Council | Norfolk – Linked procurement data | Redesigning how Norfolk publishes procurement data to create new insights. | 2014/15 | |
| North Somerset Council | Customer information portal and dashboards | To implement a suite of tools that use existing 'best of breed' Open Data applications and standard driven information management tools using Datashare as the core. | 2013/14 | |
| North Somerset Council | Providing open access to multi-media historic and tourism data | Creation of schemas that will enable the 'open' publication of data which can be applied to the release of both local history and tourism. Publication of comprehensive information about tourist information /landmarks to assist in developing local tourism. | 2014/15 | |
| Peterborough City Council | Index of open data sets to aid comparison across councils. | To create index schemas and tool for metadata inventory and core datasets to enable comparisons and combination of indexed datasets from different councils and enable a direct link to data.gov.uk | 2013/14 | |
| Redbridge Council | DataShare | The project seeks funding to distribute the data publishing software Datashare to approximately 100 authorities and extend its functionality. | 2013/14 | |
| Salford City Council | A Local Plan for Local Data | To develop a local open data portal based on CKAN open source technology which compliments national and regional data portals | 2014/15 | |
| Sedgemoor District Council | Community Impact Mitigation of Hinkley Point C Nuclear Power Station | The project will extract that evidence from documents, and publish it as 5* linked data, linked to mitigation projects, encouraging 3rd party presentation and analysis | 2014/15 | Evaluation report |
| Sheffield City Council | Sheffield Open Air Quality Network Data | Air Quality+ published open data related to the topic of air quality in Sheffield, and delivered a programme of co-design activities to engage people with the data and use it to better understand and tackle the issue of air quality. | 2014/15 | |
| Sunderland City Council | Sunderland Software City Data Brokerage (SoftDB) | Development of an open data web feature service for publishing and linking transport, utility and weather data. Part of the innovation challenge programme to create open data for use by SMEs. | 2013/14 | |
| Surrey Heath Borough Council | Countywide Planning Open Data | A PanSurrey data feed of live planning information, harvested from every district council. Part of the Surrey Digital Services (SDS) programme. The aggregator tool and API will feed planning applications using open source code published on GitHub. | 2013/14 | |
| Tameside Council | Local Sites for Local People | The Local Sites for Local People project facilitated the collation and release of polygon (map) data and metadata in relation to designated Local Wildlife Sites including land ownership details in Greater Manchester (GM). | 2014/15 |