Presented by Heike Schuster-James, Programme Manager for Digital Birmingham, to local SME's as part of the BBC's Digital Week and 'Put Intelligence into your Breakfast' event on Friday 20 March 2015.

1. Using Open Data
Birmingham Data Factory
Heike Schuster-James – Programme
Manager Digital Birmingham
20/03/2015

2. What is Open Data?
• Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and
redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to
the requirement to attribute and sharealike.
[OKF Open Data Handbook]
• ‘non-personal’ by default
• Availability and Access: free of charge or at reasonable
reproduction cost, download over the internet, in convenient
and modifiable form
• Reuse and Redistribution: licence permits reuse and
redistribution including mashing with other datasets
• Universal Participation: no limitation by purpose such as
‘non-commercial’ or ‘education only’

3. How can it add value?
• Growing resource at no cost
• Add local knowledge to your intelligence
• Stand-alone use to gain insights
• Download and mix with own sources
• Use real-data to test new apps
• Encourage others to share
• Must check quality

4. Indices of Multiple Deprivation
Stand-alone use of national data, free of charge, map out your
customer base, download and create your own graphs

5. Open Street Map
Local knowledge, accurate, up-to-date, API

6. DataShine
Understand your locality

7. Glasgow Footfall Data
Glasgow council convinced retailers and other business to share

8. Birmingham Data Factory
https://data.birmingham.gov.uk: search by organisation, group, keyword

9. Data available
Currently – 20 datasets:
•Business rates, Energy consumption, FOI responses and
datasets that Government requests e.g. spent above £500,
charity funding
•Access to traffic management data on request
Soon to be released:
•Cooperation with Centro
•Opticities and Open Transport Network projects: location data
for parking, public transport, traffic info
•Social housing stock

10. data.gov.uk

11. data.gov.uk
• Big national datasets
• 1326 Publishers from Cabinet Office to
Supreme Court
• Household income, crime statistics, energy
display certificates, construction industry
stats, M&A of UK companies, retail sales…

12. Requesting data
Data.gov.uk: register and
request, supported by ODUG
(open data user group)
Local councils and public
sector: Submit FOI request
for data (Right to Data),
specify you’d like it to be
published as ‘open data’