A Quick Preview

Now that we have loaded a healthy chunk of our initial open data sets up to the Amazon cloud storage that we will be using to serve them from I have started adding a few to the catalogue.

The catalogue is a Ruby on Rails application that will form the basis of our open data web presence and will look like a much more heavily populated version of this:

If you love something, set it free…

It seems our initial fears of reluctance within WCC to release data were mostly unfounded. Over the course of last few days our open data has, quite literally, been trickling in.

So for everyone eagerly awaiting the grand launch of WCC’s Open Data site, I can confirm we will have the following datasets:

• WCC School closures
• WCC News
• WCC Events
• WCC Councillors
• Committee Meetings
• Jobs
• Museums
• One Stop Shops
• Libraries
• Country Parks
• Recycling Centres
• Schools
• School admissions data

And (hopefully) the following datasets will be coming to a screen near you very soon:

• Pupils on roll
• Pupils with SEN
• Free School Meal eligibility
• Pupils with a first language other than English
• Pupil ethnic groups
• Pupil absences
• Pupil exclusions
• Roadworks information
• Congestion information
• Election information

Coming Soon…

This blog is part of the forthcoming Warwickshire Open Data initiative being run by the ICT Strategy team in Warwickshire County Council.

The point of this work is to provide a single point where anyone can get hold of raw data and web services from the authority. We hope this will lead to new levels of transparency as well as providing the building blocks for those who would like to build web sites and applications that use and analyse our data.

The technical work is nearing completion and we are working with our colleagues inside the organisation to find and expose numerous sets of information – a limited set will be available at launch which will steadily increase over the coming months.

As part of our work to publicise this initiative we will also be holding a “Hack Warwickshire” competition, which will challenge everyone to come up with new and innovative uses for our data and web services. More information on this will be available once the open data site is up and running.

Please check back for more updates in the next couple of weeks, we hope to have the site up and running in early April, until then if you have any questions, please contact us at opendata@warwickshire.gov.uk – or you could visit our ICT Strategy blog at www.abigbang.wordpress.com.