The Spatial Hub project is all about improving the quality and access of local government data. It now has 36 national datasets (created from over 1000+ supplied data updates), covering such important areas as:
- planning
- community
- environment
- transport
This data is now being used by some 100 organisations across the public sector.
Because of the nature of its business, local government data is generally collected with one specific purpose in mind. Little thought is given to how the data could be better created so that it can be more widely used. Instead it isn't particularly accessible, nor linkable with other data sources, meaning that any digital applications or processes built using, or on top of, the data could be fundamentally flawed. The Spatial Hub has been built to address these issues, as well as turning the data into a commercial asset, that can be used to generate sustainable funding to resource the project and invest in local authority data improvement. In 2019, £250k was given back to local government to help fund data improvement activities.
The challenge
Frequently, data collected by local government for specific business purposes is only used once with little thought to how it could be used elsewhere. This is despite local government having legal obligations to make it accessible and interoperable for other purposes under the EU INSPIRE Directive. When setting policy, data collection and standardisation (which is important so that policies can be assessed and monitored) is often overlooked. This creates a disconnect between policy staff and data staff and it becomes very difficult to get a clear picture of what is going on. If deficiencies in the data can be addressed at a national level and the data can be more widely used and valued, it will help raise the profile of the importance of good, well-resourced data management in local government, which is the building block for digital transformation.
The solution
The Spatial Hub is built on mostly open-source technology, which keeps maintenance costs down. It enables efficient collection, transformation and publication of local government data every quarter.
Agreements were set up with each council, enabling the Improvement Service to act on their behalf to implement a data quality improvement programme and to facilitate access to their datasets to a wide range of end users.
Datasets were incrementally prioritised, collected and published over the past three years.
Currently, data is made available to the public sector in line with the One Scotland Mapping Agreement using organisational authentication keys. However, datasets will soon be made available to other sectors of the data community. This includes enabling the commercial sector to pay for data access - as already happens with the One Scotland Gazetteer (via Ordnance Survey's addressing products).
Impact and results
Since 2016 there have been over 1,000 uploads of data from local authorities. There are now 36 national datasets being continuously collected, improved and published from the Spatial Hub.
98 organisations have been issued with Spatial Hub authentication keys and are actively accessing datasets for their business.
Several organisations, like SEPA and Marine Scotland, are using bespoke web services that have been created specifically for them to stream Spatial Hub datasets directly into their online web mapping applications
There have been 713,500 uses of Spatial Hub datasets since 2016.
The most popular Spatial Hub datasets are:
- School catchments
- Planning applications
- Tree Preservation Orders
£250,000 (raised from Ordnance Survey sales of address data) has been reimbursed to local authorities to spend specifically on certain areas of data improvements.
How is this approach being sustained?
The "value add" of data collation, improvement and publication comes at a cost, and it is it argued that doing this once and making the outputs widely available is the most cost-effective option. Without specific central government funding, the Improvement Service has determined that the most sustainable business model is to generate revenue from commercial usage of the datasets. Providing revenue to councils, to be targeted at improving their data quality, has raised the profile of the people collecting the data. This in turn leads to their roles being better respected and protected.
The money generated from data sales may also be used to look at potential solutions for generic issues across the local government data community e.g. better ways to collect and share data over the web.
Lessons learned
Data management and improvement only becomes pertinent to organisations once they begin to perceive real, tangible value and benefit from it. It was quickly realised that it is more effective to cajole people into doing something by helping them to realise that it has value and worth.
Developing the Spatial Hub avoids the need for each external organisation wishing to use this data having to do the same work themselves. This directly addresses one of the economic issues of low productivity caused by wasted and duplicated effort, for no net gain.
Next steps
Once partnership agreements are in place with companies that wish to sell Spatial Hub data to the private sector, the c.100 'end user' companies that have been requesting data will be put in touch with them. The hope is to have a continuous sustainable source of income that will pay for this service, as well as enable the continuous provision of funds back to local government to help resource data improvements. Money will also be used to iteratively improve the way that data is collected, made more linkable and published via the Spatial Hub.
Phone: 01506 282012