United Kingdom / 2014 97% open

Generally public transport in the UK is run by private companies, with some government or municipality regulation. Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) national passenger rail timetable information is available on http://data.atoc.org/rail-industry-data and updated weekly; registration is required but free, and once registered the data can be downloaded in bulk under CC-BY UK ported (checked 20 Oct 2013). Fares data is available from the same source under the same licence. Daily schedules of all trains and real-time running information (down to individual signalling events) is available on https://datafeeds.networkrail.co.uk under a licence based on UK OGL v1.

Public transport timetables for bus, light rail, tram and ferry services in Great Britain (but not national rail or coach services) is at http://data.gov.uk/dataset/traveline-national-dataset; this dataset is updated weekly, can be downloaded in bulk and is licensed under the UK OGL v2. An open data source for (privately operated) national coach services or for rail and bus services in the devolved province of Northern Ireland is not known. Data is provided by Translink NI Railways: http://www.translink.co.uk/Services/NI-Railways/Routes--Timetables/All-Timetables/

It cannot be downloaded in bulk and is not provided in a machine readable format (only PDF). There was posted a freedom to information request on the What-do-they-know portal: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/availability_of_timetable_statio but it was not successful (data could not be released). Also a general problem is that both data providers are private entities and not an official government related source.

There is a community working on the open rail data and helping to make it easier to use with documentation: http://nrodwiki.rockshore.net/ List of Open Data Releases: http://nrodwiki.rockshore.net/index.php/OpenDataReleases

Central Government departments are required to regularly publish lists of all financial transactions spending over £25,000; some departments publish transactions down to £500 or lower. The business rules and the format is described at http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130129110402/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/psr_transparency_index.htm The data is re-usable under the UK's Open Government Licence. In addition summarised spending information by month x department x type of goods/services is available quarterly from the Treasury (Ministry of Finance) COINS/OSCAR database - see for instance https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hmt-oscar-publishing-from-the-database This is also available under the Open Government Licence. The data was last updated/released in September 2014.

2014 reviewer comment: The data in no longer available through COINS or 'Where does my money go'. It can be found on data.gov.uk platform. I added the correct link to the information and a link to the data license.

Update: While you need to fill out a form in order to get access to the Ordnance Survey's Code-Point Open dataset, the Office for National Statistics publishes postcode data under an open licence publicly on the web.

Revision: you need to fill a form to get access to this dataset. Then you get a link by email.

Open postcode data which meets the specification here (postcodes and corresponding geospatial locations - lat/long or equivalent) is available via the Ordnance Survey's Code-Point Open dataset, which contains the 1.4m GB post codes each with a UK national grid reference of the postcode's location in eastings and northings (convertable to lat/long by published formulae) and with the administrative area (country/county/district/ward, plus National Health Service Region and Authority) in which it is located. This is updated quarterly. Similar Postcode data for the devolved province of Northern Ireland is not available as Open Data. The main UK address database (~24m individual addresses) is confusing called the Postcode Address File. This is a subscription-only database privately owned by the Royal Mail. The Open Data User Group have been pressing for its release too - see http://data.gov.uk/blog/dont-sell-our-postcodes-odug-on-why-we-should-have-open-addressing-in-the-uk The Postcode data as of August 2014 is available here: https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/Docs/PostCodes/ONSPD_AUG_2014_csv.zip The geographic coverage is United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland). More detailed information on the dataset can be found here: https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/geoportal/catalog/search/resource/details.page?uuid={473A5770-FB1B-4C1A-AEEC-5DC056E5EC7F}

The data is published by the Ordnance Survey (https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/) for Great Britain and is open data: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendatadownload/products.html.

The Ordnance Survey's OpenData suite of digital products includes 1:250,000 scale raster mapping for all of Great Britain, and additional national mapping at higher resolution (OS StreetView and OS VectorMap District). These products are actively maintained. As Ordnance Survey is the national mapping agency for Great Britain only, the coverage excludes Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.

The Ordnance Survey's OpenData product suite includes mapping with better than 1:250,000 resolution (OS Street View) and is released under the OS OpenData Licence, which complies with the Open Definition. The mapping is updated regularly (most recently in May 2012).

Northern Ireland

Separate data for Northern Ireland is provided by Ordnance Survey for Northern Ireland (OSNI) (http://www.nidirect.gov.uk/ordnance-survey-of-northern-ireland). Data for Northern Ireland is not yet available as open data (http://www.nidirect.gov.uk/index/information-and-services/property-and-housing/your-neighbourhood-roads-and-streets/ordnance-survey-of-northern-ireland/product-range/digital-products.htm).

OSNI sells it data (http://www.nidirect.gov.uk/index/information-and-services/property-and-housing/your-neighbourhood-roads-and-streets/ordnance-survey-of-northern-ireland/product-range/paper-products/price-lists.htm). And data is not available on bulk for the whole national territory as it is split between the two websites.

Open data mapping for Northern Ireland is not currently available at resolutions of 1:250,000 or better.

A comprehensive database of UK legislation is maintained online by The National Archives, an agency of the Ministry of Justice. The information is re-usable under the UK's Open Government Licence. -- update after asking National Archives and checking online --- A variety of machine readable formats are available through the API - see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/developer/formats (amended machine-readable to yes and updated formats). Currently the database is not downloadable in bulk. Initially the target was to provide this by end-March 2014

Update on Bulk Download: We received the following response following a request for an update on the progress that has been made towards offering bulk download: " We have made some progress on bulk downloads and there is currently a project underway to make bulk downloads of all legislation.gov.uk data publicly available. Some data is already available at http://leggovuk.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/ in XML and HTML formats. However it should be noted that this is a trial site that is expected to change. New legislation is published on a daily basis as are amendments to existing legislation. The download site is currently still in development so is not being regularly updated with new content at the present time. At the moment there are no bulk downloads available for PDFs. The data on legislation.gov.uk has been collated over a number of years from a variety of sources and is not all in the same base format. We plan to make available a dataset of original print PDFs - these are versions of the original hardcopy documents as published. However, we do not hold all legislation in this format so this will not contain all the legislation on the website."

The UK's Electoral Commission publishes an authoritative collection of electoral results (including general elections, local council elections and EU Parliament elections). The results are collected from local returning officers by a third party on behalf of the Electoral Commission. The Electoral Commission makes the bulk data available for download in CSV and Excel spreadsheet formats. In October 2013 the Electoral Commission updated the terms on its website to make it clear that the electoral data was re-usable under the Open Government Licence. Data is provided timely. The data was last updated in May 2014 with results of the local council and European Parliament Elections.

Companies House, the public body responsible for maintaining company registers in the UK, has since June 2012 made available a subset of the fields of the register for all companies for bulk download as monthly 'snapshot', at no charge and on an open basis. The subset of the information is documented at http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/toolsToHelp/pdf/freeDataProductDataset.pdf and meets the minimum requirements of the definition of this element of the OKFN Census 2013. Full information from individual company registers remains subject to payment. Data is timely and was last updated on Dec, 1st 2014.

The UK's Office for National Statistics has primary responsibility for maintaining and publishing national economic and demographic information (including the Census). ONS material is re-usable under the terms of the Open Government Licence and UK Government Licensing Framework. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/datasets-and-tables/index.html lists (as of 14 Oct 2013) 13059 datasets and reference tables available under the OGL. Each of the datasets is downloadable in full, machine-readable formats (mainly Excel, but some also available in CSV and XML). Data is not available in bulk - users must download each file separately. There are a variety of Census 2011 datasets including population by local authority (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census/key-statistics-and-quick-statistics-for-local-authorities-in-the-united-kingdom---part-1/rft-ks101uk.xls), GDP dataset (2Q2013 at http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/naa2/quarterly-national-accounts/q2-2013/tsd-quarterly-national-accounts--q2-2013.html with links to XML and CSV formats), and unemployment by age and duration (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/september-2013/table-unem01.xls) Some, but not all, of these datasets are fed onto data.gov.uk Statistics are released according to a published schedule.

Realtime and recent historical data about observed levels of air pollutants and particulates at 128 automatic observing stations across the UK are at http://uk-air.defra.gov.uk. Pollutants covered include Ozone, Nitric oxide, Nitrogen dioxide, Nitrogen oxides as nitrogen dioxide, Sulphur dioxide, Carbon monoxide, PM10 particulate matter, Non-volatile PM10, Volatile PM10, PM2.5 particulate matter, Non-volatile PM2.5, and Volatile PM2.5. All this data is under the Open Government Licence. An RSS feed of latest data is available at http://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/rss/current_site_levels.xml , although this points to HTML pages such as http://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/data/site-data?f_site_id=ACTH&view=last_hour . The Data Selector http://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/data/data_selector allows a custom table to be constructed and either viewed or sent to the requestor as a CSV file. However there is a limit on the extent of the query (one test-drive for the Census gave "The selection you requested will return 1176 rows of data in 770 columns. This exceeds our limit of 256 columns."). This meets the Census requirement, apart from bulk download. In addition national estimates of annual emissions of 36 air pollutants from 1971-2011 are downloadable in CSV format under the Open Government Licence from http://naei.defra.gov.uk/data/data-selector, but again this is in the form of a table-builder and it does not seem possible to download all the data in bulk. Further public environmental data for the UK is maintained by several public bodies (mainly the Environment Agency for England and Wales, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency, plus Defra and DECC). Broadly speaking, data on major sources of pollutants is readily available via Government websites and public mapping applications. Some complete datasets are available as open data, notably from Defra: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-environment-food-rural-affairs/series/air-quality-and-emissions-statistics. Some environmental data is subject to additional licensing arrangements - see for instance http://www.geostore.com/environment-agency/WebStore?xml=environment-agency/xml/ogcDataDownload.xml

Reviewer 2014 - Data continues not to be available in bulk. Added link to the license.

The position seems to be as follows. There is an annual "Budget speech" and documents are published online by HM Treasury and are re-useable under the terms of the UK's Open Government Licence. For 2014 all the documents are provided in PDF format. However this does not usually include detailed departmental budgets. Departmental level budgets are in a number of places, but the two collections available regularly free of charge under the UK Open Government Licence are: (1) the annual "Estimates" published each April for the financial year commencing that April. These are published in PDF format department by department and are at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hmt-main-estimates for the last three years 2011-12, 2012-13, and 2013-14 The dataset for this fiscal year is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/main-supply-estimates-2014-to-2015. This dataset is "up to date" (2) the same, and some more detailed, data is contained in the "Plans" part of the COINS/OSCAR dataset http://data.gov.uk/dataset/coins (this also contains matching expenditure information). Although the expenditure information is published quarterly, the "plans" are not currently published in OSCAR data until the end of the financial year to which they relate. Once Plans information is available on OSCAR it is available for bulk download in machine readable format (CSV). In assessing the ratings fairly it was necessary to choose between the "Estimates" and "OSCAR" versions - the OSCAR version seemed closer to the ideal, even though it was not as up to date, and that is assessed here. - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/oscar-annual-data-october-2014