Management Toolkit

NI finance department opens access to data

Kable

Published: 17 Aug 2009 16:18 BST

Northern Ireland's finance department is publishing sets of non-personal data online with the aim of improving public access.

OpenDataNI, a pilot scheme, has opened with data on the locations of healthcare and social-care providers, the rotas for out-of-hours pharmacies, the amount of waste produced by NI's 26 district councils and various data on pupils at each of its nursery schools.

The site plans to add information on public transport and leisure. NI's departments, agencies and non-departmental public bodies will be asked to publish sets of non-personal data through the site.

"OpenDataNI will demonstrate to other Northern Ireland civil service departments the benefits of allowing publicly available mapping and imagery to be used in conjunction with publicly available data sets to provide useful services to citizens," said Sammy Wilson, NI's finance minister.

"By presenting data in a highly visual manner, it is anticipated that interaction with information will be far easier than through traditional table-based methods."

Publication of raw data can allow its reuse by third parties, such as by combining it with other data in a mashup. There is particular potential in publishing geographic data, as locations can be added to online maps.