Our environment hack day is upon us! While we finalise the last minute preparations, we thought it would be useful to give a quick overview of the new and updated datasets that have been published this week.
Geographical Data
On Monday we announced our new geographic data collection. As promised, we’ve been expanding this over the last few days, bringing the total up to 106 different geographic layers. The new layers include all of the local data published under INSPIRE as well as boundaries for community farms, growing spaces, and park amenities. The amenity data even includes location of park benches and their inscriptions! The layers are also being added and regularly updated within the main data store.
The geographic data is ideal for use with CartoDB. If you’re coming along to the hack day this weekend then sign-up to their platform and their community newsletter. This will help show the interest and support from our local community. If you’re expecting to use CartoDB at the weekend, then get in touch to get your account upgraded.
To throw a wildcard into the mix, we’ve also been given an extract of the more detailed LIDAR point cloud data which will shortly by published by the Environment Agency. Thanks to some work by Mark Owen, we have a nice image that shows the coverage of the data.
Energy Data
To support the energy usage data ideas we’ve heard about over the last few weeks, we’ve also now published some energy usage data:
- Two years worth of half-hourly energy usage readings from council owned properties across the area. This covers public buildings like libraries and the town hall, but also parking barriers and other locations.
- Historical, anonymised energy usage data for local schools (here’s an alternate presentation of the data). This covers all of the schools in the area
With this data we can dig into building dashboards and similar support tools for schools.
The council owned property data is live and will be regularly updated. The anonymised school data is provided for research purposes, so we can prototype over the weekend. The data comes from a previous study on energy usage by Transition Bath. If we build some interesting tools for the schools then we can get their data automatically added to the main datasets.
Environmental Protection
The council environmental protection team have provided us with data on their service requests. This provides a break down of the types of cases being reported across the city, when they were reported, closed, etc. The data is anonymised and reports have been linked to the nearest road, following the same methodology that is used to report crime data.
A lot of effort has gone into preparing the new data releases, so huge thanks to Dave Rowe, Mark Owen, Jon Poole, Micaela Beresford and Philip Haile for their support and help!
Also, a massive thank you to all our event sponsors. Your support is amazing! We also want to thank Independent Spirit, Honey’s Cider, Electric Bear, Bath Ales and Whole Bagel for their support with providing food and drinks for the events.
