Home>FAQs

Frequently asked questions

What is Open Data?

According to the definition given by The Open Data Institute

“Open data is data that is made available by organisations, businesses and individuals for anyone to access,  use and share.”

What is York Open Data?

York Open Data is a place for businesses and organisations to publicly share their open data to be used by anybody wishing to make a difference in their local area by having the ability to connect to 100s of up-to-date, searchable data sets.

How can I use this data?

Ideally all data on the York Open Data will be open data, which means you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. Nevertheless, some of the data may have a different license and it will be your responsibility as a user to take into consideration the possible restrictions of each license.

Can I Publish My Own Data?

Yes. When it comes to open data, York Open Data is open and actively seeking for any potential collaboration with both public and private sector organisations and businesses. We have solutions in place that allow us to provide your organisation with its own self-managed account within the platform. To explore the options available, please contact us at info@yorkopendata.org or use the form available within this webpage.

How frequently is the data updated?

We have a variety of data which are updated as they deem appropriate.

You can find data which are recorded hourly, daily and weekly but only uploaded weekly into York Open Data, such as Footfall; however, there are some other large datasets which are updated monthly and yearly.

Can I use an API?

Yes. The York Open Data API is driven by CKAN. Read the full CKAN API documentation for further details.

Under what licence can I use these data?

Please read carefully the terms and conditions of our website.

How reliable is the information in York Open Data?

Data quality is one of the biggest challenges a public sector organisation faces in helping to come to evidence based decisions.

We realise that we  need to work hard to drive the quality of our data up and we are encouraging residents, businesses and our city partners to work with us to help improve our data quality.

The launch of the platform is part of our journey, and a few mistakes with data will be made along the way but we hope that you will work with us, to improve data quality and therefore better decision-making.

We have a number of checks and balances to make sure the data that is published is of high quality but as this information comes from a  variety of sources and providers there will from time to time be small issues.

If you spot any errors with information, or you have any feedback on how to increase the quality of an individual dataset please email us at info@yorkopendata.org

For further information please have a look at our disclaimer.

Who do I contact if I have a comment related to the York Open Data?

If you would like to make a suggestion or any other comment on this site you can contact us via the contact form that can be found on the right part of this same page. Please have a look at our privacy policy before using the contact us form.

Alternatively you can fill in this survey to help us guide future development of the platform and improve the understanding of the main interests and usage our customers do of York Open Data.

Will any more data be added to the York Open Data?

This is an ongoing process so, yes more and more data will be added as time goes by.

Can I find this data somewhere else?

Part of the data published by the City of York Council on York Open Data is also published in other portals such as data.gov.uk or york.gov.uk. Please note that York Open Data is the primary platform for City of York Council to publish its open data and that if accessing such data through third party portals the data may not always be correct or up to date, as in many cases those portals use automatic proccesses like harvesters over which the Council has no control.

Data published by other entities may be somewhere else too even though we don’t keep a record of where. In addition as this is open data anyone can take it and republish it wherever they want to.

What does York Open Data want to achieve?

The platform is hoping to:

  • Ensure better quality and a higher quantity of open data is released from the local authority into the hands of local citizens and businesses.
  • Bring the power of open data to a wider audience through working to make open data more accessible to all users through our open data platform.
  • Encourage developers to create transformative open data applications, and increase the profile of open data and its applicability towards transparency, strengthening democracy and supporting local, national and international economic growth.
  • Work towards providing solutions that will allow for open analysis of the council’s and city’s open data that can help revolutionise the understanding of the city needs, to meet the expectations of its residents.
  • Work towards ensuring that our open data platform is delivered in a financially sustainable manner so that as products or services are created, that developers have confidence the platform will be available long in to the future.
  • Work towards aligning our statutory responsibilities around the transparency code, and looking in to the possibilities of going as far as practically possible to be an open and transparent authority using the Open Data Platform as a place to find information.
  • Attempt to ensure that all published data is relatively easy to create, maintain, and, most importantly, to use, thus, at least in 3 stars CSV format.

Who is running York Open Data?

The responsibility for the York Open Data platform currently sits with the City of York Council.

How is York Open Data funded?

Funding for York Open Data has come from a variety of sources;

1) Funding comes from collaborative pitch by City of York Council, Leeds City Council and media partners, called the “Media Mill” partnership, to win a share of the £2.4 million funding in a competition by Nesta (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) and the Technology Strategy Board.

1) From the Breakthrough Fund  which is an initiative developed by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Cabinet Office, offering funding to support the wider release of public open data.

How does York Open Data manage my personal data?

To find out what data York Open Data may store about you please have a read of our privacy policy. For further information please have a look at our disclaimer and our terms and conditions. There is also available a privacy impact assessment for the project.

Contact us

About York Open Data

York Open Data, developed with all of the people of York at its very core, is owned and managed by the City of York Council.

As stated by the Cabinet Office “transparency is an idea whose time has come…” In the contemporary world, people from all walks of life are demanding much greater openness and accountability from their governments, both at national and local levels. To meet these expectations, the City of York Council took on an ambitious plan of publishing all of the Council’s Open Data scattered across multiple sources and systems within a single platform available in the public domain.

By taking on this challenge, we are aiming to offer a greater insight into the workings of the city than ever before, unlocking the richness of Open Data from multiple sectors across the city, and, most importantly, providing a suitable environment for use of that data towards creative development and to gain better understanding of how our city works.

We see the York Open Data project as a journey rather than a final destination, and we feel enormously privileged and proud to have this unique opportunity to invite you to take this journey with us.

If not stated otherwise, all of the data available within the York Open Data platform has been published under the UK Open Government Licence v3.0 (OGL v3.0). All of the data published by the City of York Council is in compliance with the Data Protection Act 2018.