Pollutant Emissions / 2014 100% open

What data is expected?

Aggregate data about the emission of air pollutants especially those potentially harmful to human health (although it is not a requirement to include information on greenhouse gas emissions). Aggregate means national-level or available for at least three major cities. In order to satisfy the minimum requirements for this category, data must be available for the following pollutants and meet the following minimum criteria:

• Particulate matter (PM) Levels
• Sulphur oxides (SOx)
• Nitrogen oxides (NOx)
• Volatile organic compounds (VOCs)
• Carbon monoxide (CO)
• Updated on at least once a week.
• Measured either at a national level by regions or at leasts in 3 big cities.

What data is available

•   Openly licensed? Yes(Here)
•   Is the data available for free? Yes
•   Is the data machine readable? Yes (XLS, CSV, PDF, WMS, SQLite)
•   Available in bulk? Yes
•   Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis? Yes
•   Publicly available? Yes
•   Is data in digital form? Yes
•   Is the data available online? Yes (Here)
•   Does the data exist? Yes

Details

PortalU is a central portal for environment data including sources at the national and the federal state level. The portal aggregates metadata and links to decentralized datasets and services: http://www.portalu.de - however, the cooperation between the federal states and national government has been terminated, PortalU will go offline on December 31, 2014.

Data on air and water pollution can be found at the the German version of the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register, http://www.thru.de. It allows searching for a specific site, company or field of industry (http://www.thru.de/search/?no_cache=1) as well as downloading the entire database in bulk (http://www.thru.de/fileadmin/SITE_MASTER/content/Dokumente/Downloads/PRTR-Bundle_Herbst-2014_rev1.zip). Searches can be stored as PDF or Excel files, map features can be obtained via WMS. The database is updated twice per year, every April and October. The database covers 2012 as the most recent year, which is due to the rather complicated European reporting system. The most recent update was in October 2014.

The terms and conditions are a bit unclear, as they mainly refer to general use of the site (http://www.thru.de/nutzungsbedingungen/). The terms also state that any use of the data is okay as long as the source is attributed and content is not altered or manipulated. I would interpret this as: "You shall not change values in the database, but everything else is alright", especially because thru.de has an own article on its site claiming they are open data (http://www.thru.de/thrude/auswertung/top-thema/thrude-ist-open-data/).

Reviewer comments

Changed link to license.