Tag Archives: Belfast

Open Data Case Study: How Belfast found £350,000 in rates revenues using open FHRS data

How do you prove the value of open data?

Here’s how.

 

The Food Standards Agency’s Food Hygiene Rating Schemes data is released as open data in near real-time, and the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland found a use for it.

Like every authority in the country, Belfast has a ratings shortfall – there are business rates that should be being collected, but aren’t for various reasons. And a bunch of smart people across various parts of the government and city council had a feeling that they could use datasets to improve the collection rate within the city.

Continue reading Open Data Case Study: How Belfast found £350,000 in rates revenues using open FHRS data

Could free wifi use data be useful to Belfast?

If you walk through a wifi area and have wifi enabled on your phone, the system can track a certain amount about your presence and movement. They could have that data for Belfast’s city council run wifi networks, which are on around 70 buildings – so what can be done with it? If they had enough compelling use cases they could partner with other organisations to grow the data set.

That data includes things like the device MAC address, the SSID of the network you’ve connected to, and so on.

When you login, you give consent for that data to be collected and used. You don’t if you haven’t connected. Most mobile phones announce their presence to find wifi hotspots.

What value would a wifi nerd see in this?

 

Continue reading Could free wifi use data be useful to Belfast?

Food Standards Agency supporting Open Data Camp again!

The Food Standards Agency is delighted to be sponsoring Open Data Camp 5 in Belfast.  Particularly as it is home to some of our staff and one of our offices.  And in the Open Data world of food, Northern Ireland is pretty special – it is the second country to mandate display of FHRS ratings for food premises.  So, if you are joining us in Belfast be sure to look out for eateries with a high score!

Of course, the catering provider for the event has an FHRS of 5!  Wouldn’t want anything other than ‘Good’ for our attendees.

Finally, FSA staff attending look forward to seeing many of you in Belfast.  We are really looking forward to an Open Data focussed weekend with like-minded people.  Look out for us throughout the event.  Siân, John and Naomi.

Open Data Camp 5: weekend arrangements

Open Data Camp is returning for a fifth time this coming weekend, 21st and 22nd October 2017.

This time, the Open Data Camp charabanc will be visiting the lovely city of Belfast, in Northern Ireland.

The purpose of this post is to provide details for attendees.

Where

At Queen’s University Belfast, in the Computer Science building

View Larger Map

See the Travel and Accommodation page for information on getting to Belfast from other parts of the UK and Ireland, and where to stay.

Friday

For those arriving on Friday, there’s an optional walking tour in the afternoon. There are a limited number of places, so please sign up [here]

For those who have registered for the walking tour, we will be meeting at the gates of Queen’s university at 4:30pm, and the tour lasts about 1.5 hrs.

On Friday evening, a few people will be meeting at The Duke of York from 6pm. Nothing formal, just turn up if you feel like it.

Weekend arrangements

Registration

Registration will be from 9:30am on Saturday, and 10am on Sunday. There’s no need to print your ticket, as we’ll check you in using Eventbrite. There will be tea, coffee and pastries available on arrival

Timings

At a glance

Day Registration from Welcome Lunch Last session finishes Close
Saturday 9:30am 10am 12:15-1:15pm 4:30pm 5pm
Sunday 10am 10:30am 1-2pm 3:15pm 3:45pm

There will be two sessions in the morning, and three in the afternoon on both days.

Tea, coffee and cakes will be available mid-afternoon on both days.

Lunch

A light lunch is being provided onsite, and there will be vegetarian options (at least 30%). We haven’t catered for special dietary requirements, but if you have a more specific need, please let us know in advance and we’ll try to help.

Final sessions

We aim to finish the last session by about 4.30pm on Saturday and 3:15pm on Sunday.

Evening social

Networking continues on Saturday evening, and we will be gathering at The Bear and the Doll from about 6:30pm. Remember to bring your lanyard in the evening, as there will be a (not inexhaustible) tab for Open Data Camp-ers. There will also be a snack buffet laid on (but please don’t come expecting a full meal!)

A view from inside The Bear and Doll

Never attended an Unconference before?

If you’ve never attended an unconference before, you may be wondering what on earth to expect. Unlike traditional conferences, unconferences have no pre-defined agenda, and instead attendees ‘pitch’ session ideas to each other at the beginning of the event. These ideas are then written on post-it notes, which are assigned to vacant slots on a session grid, and that becomes the agenda.

For a more detailed (and much better) explanation, and links to more information, take a look at Unconference in a Box, compiled by James Cattell.

Our Volunteers

If you need anything at the weekend, or have a question, look out for people wearing maroon hoodies emblazoned with the Open Data Camp logo. Maroon-hoodie-wearers (Volunteers) have all given up their time for free, and will do their best to help you.

If you are a volunteer and haven’t already seen it, please take a look at Pauline Roche’s blog post Volunteers and Open Data Camp.

A massive thank you to everyone who has volunteered to help plan and run Open Data Camp. I won’t list everyone in this post – you already know who you are.

Our Sponsors

As you will already be aware, Open Data Camp is free to attend. That wouldn’t be possible without the generosity of forward-thinking organisations who help cover the costs associated with holding a large event.

If you haven’t already, please take a few minutes to look at our sponsors’ web sites, and show your appreciation in person, or on Twitter.

Join us on Slack

https://opendatacamp.herokuapp.com/

https://opendatacamp.slack.com/

 

Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency sponsors Open Data Camp

The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency are pleased to be sponsoring the Open Data Camp NI promoting the use and re-use of government statistical data.

The Northern Ireland Neighbourhood Information Service (NINIS) is one function of the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA), an Agency of the Department of Finance.

The aim of NINIS is to make small area information held within Central Government and Non-Departmental Public Bodies available to as wide an audience as possible. The NINIS website contains over 2,600 datasets on a range of socio-economic themes at small-area statistical geographies; area profiles that provide statistical snapshots of an area and interactive maps that enable statistics to be interpreted readily in a spatial context. All datasets are accompanied by standardised metadata with contact details for the data supplier.

The NINIS data portal (www.nisra.gov.uk/ninis), which has been around since 2003, is one part of NINIS. We also provide advice on understanding small area statistics on an ad-hoc basis through the NISRA customer line and email, and through NINIS monthly seminars.

NISRA is committed to increasing the amount of data released in open and re-usable formats in the production of its statistical outputs and NINIS is key to progressing this Open Data Agenda with data being free to download in Open Document Spreadsheet (ODS) format.

The NINIS website has had on average over 10,000 visits each month.

Users can keep up to date with NINIS by subscribing to the NINIS E-zine or by following NISRA on twitter (@NISRA).

Belfast Open Data Camp: how are YOU getting value out of data?

At the last OD Camp, Leigh Dodds pointed out that:

“We’re often struggling to work out where the value is coming from”

This is completely something we are keen to continue talking and hearing about at OD Camp 5 in a few weeks’ time. Like Paddington Bear, Jamie and I will be packing our marmalade sandwiches to travel across the sea. Unlike Paddington, we’re doing it because we’re keen to hear about what problems people are solving with data and what the different approaches to solving those problems are. Who’s collecting the data? Who’s communicating the analysis to those people making decisions? Who, what, when, where, why?

Paddington Bear: fellow seafaring traveller and marmalade sandwich fan

As Ric (our CTO) puts it:

“Much of the value of data comes from combining it with other things, so it’s definitely worth putting effort into making it connectable. And each step of the chain needs to be able to communicate clearly with the adjacent steps for this to work well, which relies on agreement and coordination from the actors involved”

It’s going to be all kinds of good — look forward to seeing you there!

Swirrl are sponsors of Open Data Camp 5, which is coming to Belfast on 21st October and have been sponsors of Open Data Camp since it first sprouted its wings in February 2015.

Open Data in Northern Ireland – what’s happening??

We recently blogged about our excitement that Open Data Camp is coming to Belfast! As we said in that post:

“This is hugely exciting news for everyone interested in the release of & the re-use of Open Data here in Northern Ireland, providing the local open data community with a fantastic opportunity to engage with colleagues working with open data in other parts of the UK and further afield.”

In this guest post for Open Data Camp, we thought we’d provide a bit of background on what has been happening around open data in Northern Ireland.

Open Data in Northern Ireland – what’s happening??

Northern Ireland was a bit of a late starter to Open Data, but we hope because of this we have been able to learn from others about what works and what does not….

The NI open data portal went live in November 2015 and in 2017 we were placed 10th in the Global Open Data Index out of 94 nations/regions assessed! We were delighted at this placing, however, we still have a huge amount of work to be done in order to realise our goal of making all NI public sector data ‘open by default’.

Background

Strategy

“Open by default” is the position of the Northern Ireland Open Data Strategy published in 2015. There are obvious exceptions in respect of personal data, security, commercial, intellectual property rights or environmental importance.

There are nine open data principles in the strategy, and these determine how we implement open data in Northern Ireland. You can read all about them in the NI Open Data Strategy.  

Portal/s

There is one portal for all Northern Ireland public sector open data – OpenDataNI. This is a CKAN platform which is supplemented with a Microsoft Azure cloud for larger datasets. It went live in November 2015 and we are concentrating on getting key datasets that are in demand published.

The aim of the ODNI portal is to establish & promote best practice standards, to not only enable access to the data but also to ensure that it conforms to metadata standards & open accessibility standards.

The portal has the facility for users to Suggest data to be published – Departments then have 10 days to reply to say if the data can be released (i.e. does not fall within any of the exceptions in the strategy) or not and if it can be released, they must put forward a date by which the data will be published.

Users can also comment on published datasets and on other people’s suggested datasets.

Outside of the public sector there is the Detail Data portal which is part of the detail data project – a BIG Lottery NI funded partnership between the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action and The Detail investigative journalism website.

The aim of the project is to develop the ability of the voluntary and community sector to use data effectively to create and enhance social, economic and environmental value.

The positives – So what is working?

OpenDataNI Portal

Technically enforcing the mandatory creation of DCAT metadata in order to publish open data has been very successful.

Enforcing a mandatory level of 3 Stars of open data has also been successful.

To date, we have 260 datasets published on the open data portal with an average audience of just over 2000 users per month which is steadily increasing.

We have had some key datasets published including all government held LiDAR data for rivers, road upgrades and key heritage sites. There are also 450,000 rows of prescription data published on the site per month, totalling a staggering 5.4 million rows of data per year – we now have 4 years’ worth of prescription data published.

Stimulating reuse

We currently have 16 showcases published on the portal; via twitter, we promote these showcases and seek more from the OD user community so as to demonstrate what they are doing with open data. We have showcases on topics ranging from an application to identify trees in Belfast City Council area, to an interactive visualisation of car accidents in Northern Ireland.

We also ran a successful challenge last year asking participants to use data from OpenDataNI to create new and innovative teaching resources for either primary or secondary level schools.

The 2 winning projects were Our Raging Planet aimed at geography students to simulate natural disasters such as volcanoes and earthquakes in a local environment, and Gaff Game which teaches students to learn SQL programming language using datasets from OpenDataNI to find the best place to live in Belfast. You can check out our video about the challenge or read more about it.

User community

We are increasingly working with a wider user community for NI open data. We have an internal Implementation Board driving forward the open data strategy with representation from all 9 government departments. But we also have set up an Open Data Advisory Panel which consists of local private sector companies, academia, voluntary and community, open government representatives and local technical activists. We consult them for advice and as a sounding board for ideas.

The ODI Belfast node launched in September 2015. It is a Learning and Networking Node which aims to contribute to the local and regional development of open data, ensuring open data for everyone.

The node has been a great addition to NI providing training, completing research projects, holding open data events and generally promoting the benefits of open data for Northern Ireland. ODI Belfast is based at the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action (NICVA).

The Ulster University runs an Interactive Media BA (Hons) course and now has a module entirely devoted to working with OpenDataNI data!

The barriers – What is not working?

Despite extensive engagement by the OpenDataNI team with the broader NI public sector, we are still faced with low levels of proactive publication of open data by our public sector…. the majority of releases are driven by the Suggested Dataset mechanism by the user community.

What we are hoping will change this is a combination of

    • more targeted engagement at senior level to highlight the benefits of publishing data as open data;
    • we are also planning to publically release a dashboard created from our open data publications, of the numbers of datasets by publisher and also the status of the suggested datasets; and
    • we are also working towards automated data publishing and are currently running a pilot project.

We obviously are open to all other suggestions and are really looking forward to #ODCamp in Belfast, where we can chat with others who may be able to tell us what in their experience helps.

Tourism plug!

Belfast has much to offer attendees from here and further afield…. just by way of example, Belfast was named as the best UK city at the 2016 Guardian and Observer Travel Awards.

Visitors to Open Data Camp 5 in Belfast can be assured of the warmest of warm welcomes, and we hope that many will avail themselves of the opportunity to take in some of the many sights and attractions that Belfast and the surrounding area has to offer whilst here. Here are some links to find the top things to do in Belfast before and after #ODCamp!

Discover Northern Ireland

Visit Belfast

 

Announcing Open Data Camp 5

We are delighted to announce that Open Data Camp is returning once again. Open Data Camp 5 will be the weekend of 21/22 October at Queen’s University Belfast, in the Computer Science building

The Computer Science building at Queen’s University

We are really grateful to Queen’s University, and the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in particular,
for letting us use their magnificent Computer Science building, and to Suzanne and Cormac from OpenDataNI for making such a convincing case for Belfast to host our next event.

In case you’ve no idea what Open Data Camp is, here’s a quick recap:

Open

‘Open’ means that data has made available with little or no restriction on its use, as set out in a licence.

Data

‘Data’, refers to text, words, numbers, images, sound and video etc. (Hang on, what’s the difference between data and information? See this useful explanation.)

Camp

‘Camp’ is a term commonly used to refer to an ‘unconference’, which basically means it’s an event with no predefined agenda – instead, attendees ‘pitch’ session ideas to each other.

“Open data is data that anyone can access, use and share.”

More info to follow

We will let you have lots more information in the coming weeks, which will of course include details of ticketing, travel and accommodation.

Photo Credit

Cormac McConaghy