Aberdeen is a city with enormous digital potential. It could be a Smart City. But some of the building blocks are not in place. These include the provision of an Open Data Platform. Comparisons with the other six Scottish cities and with English cities of a similar size all show Aberdeen is being held back by the city council not providing an OD platform.
Ian Watt has blogged extensively on this.
At Code The City 11, we explored ideas for raising awareness of this issue. In the absence of an open data portal, citizens and businesses have nowhere to go to get properly licensed, machine-readable, neutrally-formatted data. The only way to provide a solution to this is to request datasets one by one. In providing these, the council will need to make sure the data is valid and in the process will preparing the data for a city portal if they create one later.
Proper open data which is
- not a PDF,
- in a neutral, machine-readable format (e.g. CSV not Excel)
- explicitly licensed for re-use using the Open Government Licence
- meets at least 3 stars on the five star open data shema
Anyone can do anything they want with open data. This can include commercial and non-commercial uses.
In our case, we want to try to set up some temporary hosting of the data until the city has a properl open data portal, so it is essential that the council provide the data with a licence to re-use under OGL.