Manchester joins open data drive

The information includes location of libraries, recycling sites, banks and open spaces

Manchester City Council is the latest local authority to publish open data on its web site.

The information, including locations of libraries, recycling sites, banks and open spaces, is available in a range of file formats. Offered under an Open Government Licence, Manchester’s data has a range of applications – for example KML file data is available for use in customised web mapping systems.

A spokeswoman said the information had taken a number of months to collate, and a dedicated team will now pull together a second set of data, due to be published online in December. “The next batch of information is likely to include geographical data as well as Freedom of Information request responses,” she said.

Manchester is following close behind its neighbours in the north west of England. In July, Salford City Council published open data for the first time including information on schools, council members and meetings. In August, Trafford Council published details of councillors' expenses and the council’s spending on suppliers. Trafford Council leader Matt Colledge said the council was “committed to using technology to increase our transparency” and that Trafford thought it “important for us to make our information available for people in a usable form”.

Including Manchester, 33 out of 434 UK councils now publish open data, according to the web site Openlylocal.com. Of these only 28 are “truly open”, which the site defines as that which explicitly allows free and open reuse, including commercial reuse, and at the very most applies share-alike and attribution restrictions to the data.

The UK government is pushing local authorities to make more open data available, to increase transparency and reduce time spent on responding to Freedom of Information requests.

It is particularly keen to see more authorities publishing data in a linked format, which makes it easier for users to compare information from a range of sources. But so far, its success has been limited. Twenty-one local authorities took part in a trial to publish linked open data during the May 2010 general election.

The experiment showed some councils lacked staff with basic web skills, and “many lack web publishing resources, never mind the resources to implement open, linked data publishing” according to the data.gov.uk web site. In October this year, the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead claimed it was the first local authority in the UK to publish open and linked data, including spending figures.