New feature: search for information by postcode

Why was it important that the UK government open up the geographic infrastructure? Because it makes so many location-based things that were tortuous, almost trivial.

Previously, getting open data about your local councillors, given just a postcode, was a tortuous business, requiring multiple calls to different sites. Now, it is easy. Just go to http://openlylocal.com/areas/postcodes/%5Byourpostcodehere%5D and, bingo, you’re done.

You can also just put your postcode in the search box on any OpenlyLocal page to do the same thing. And, obviously, you can also download the data as XML or JSON, and with an open data licence that allows reuse by anybody, even commercial reuse.

There’s still a little bit of tweaking to be done. I need to match up postcodes county electoral divisions, and I’m planning on adding RDF to the data types returned. Finally, it’d be great to show the ward boundaries on a map, but I think that may take a little more work.

Online services provided by your council: rewiring LocalDirectGov

One of the things I’ve had on my ToDo list for OpenlyLocal for a while was providing a a list of links to online services provided by each Local Authority.

Seemed like something that should be on the site, and available as structured data; it also looked like it should be fairly easy to do, as it’s a service that’s sort of provided by central government (LocalDirectGov), though with some shortcomings.

The problem is that from a usability point of view the Local DirectGov interface is a bit clunky. First you choose the service you want the link for, which means using an A-Z (always a bit of a problem). This is the landing page, and as you can see you’re on the A’s.

So let’s say you want Hazardous Waste. Is that under H or W? Actually it’s under W, so click on W, and then on “Waste – Hazardous” and a new window opens (why?). You then need to enter your postcode, town or council in a form and you’ll then be (usually) given a link to click through to get to the council page.

However, depending on what you put in there and what category you want you may be asked to choose a particular council or be told that you council does not provide the service online:

 

Frustrating.

Now there is a limited way for external websites to interact with this service, using the ‘white-label’ Local DirectGov application. There’s even a case study. Basically, you download a list of services provided by each type of council, and then build a LocalDirectGov URL, which redirects to the council service.

Terrific. Not hard to do, even for a coder as slow as me. The only problem is that it doesn’t work. For the end user that is.

The thing is, there’s no way of knowing whether the local authority actually provides a given service online, and there’s a fair chance that the URL you’ve just built up will resolve to a bog-standard contact page, or even worse non-existent page resulting in a 404 error. Not great for users, and there appears no way of programmatically finding out if link will work, even though it’s there in Local DirectGov’s database (which is how it says that the service isn’t provided).

So, we’ve tried to fix on OpenlyLocal this and provide a better version. First we’ve collected up the useful data for each authority (i.e. where there’s a specific page to that subject, and not a 404 or generic “contact us” page). Then we’ve put it all on one page, and made it searchable too. It’s clean, simple, and works:

You can also search it from the main council page if you want to in an Ajaxy live-search way (obviously the search also works without javascript, for screenreaders and other text browsers):

 

Finally, you can access the data through the API as XML or JSON. So far, we’ve done a little over half the local authorities, and should have all the rest done by sometime next week (it’s just a matter of tying the remaining local authorities to their LocalDirectGov IDs, which has to be done manually).

As ever, comments, bug reports and feature requests welcome.

OpenlyLocal info on your website, Part 1: Google Gadgets

1. As I promised at the excellent TalkAboutLocal unconference in Stoke, I’ve been working on ways of helping non-techies use the local council data opened up by OpenlyLocal.com . The first of these is a Google Gadget, which can be added to your iGoogle page or your hyperlocal Blogger blog.

Though writing a Google Gadget can be a frustrating business, adding and using it is a doddle. Basically, if OpenlyLocal is extracting the data from your local authority (and we’ve got over 70 councils so far, with more being added every week — see the parsed council list for details), the gadget will show the key info at a glance — basic contact details, updated info, members, committees and forthcoming meetings.

For iGoogle users

1. Go to iGoogle and click on “Add stuff” in the top right-hand corner of the page.
   
2. Click on “Add feed or gadget” at the bottom of the left column
   
3. In the box that pops up enter (or paste) http://openlylocal.com/tools/gadget.xml and click “Add”. Click OK to the box asking you if you want to add the gadget.
   
4. Go back to the iGoogle home page, and the gadget will have appeared and will need you to choose your council. Choose the council, click “save”, and you’re done.
   

Note you can drag the gadget anywhere you want on the page, and even add more than one copy of the gadget, if you want to have ones for different councils.

You can also share the gadget with friends, neighbours, colleagues etc. Just click on the triangle in the top right of the gadget. This is also where you go if you want to delete the gadget.

For Blogger users

1. Make sure you’re logged in and go to the Customize area (the link is in the top right hand corner of the screen) where should choose “Layout” and “Page Elements”
   
2. On the template that you’re presented with there’s a block of boxes representing widgets/sidebars, including “Add a gadget”. Click on this.
   
3. You’ll then be given a selection of gadgets, with a menu on the left-hand side. Click the link that says “Add your own”
   
4. A form will appear with a space for the gadget’s URL. Enter (or paste) http://openlylocal.com/tools/gadget.xml and click “Add”.
   
5. You will be then asked to configure the gadget. Select the council and click the “Save” button.
   

We’re planning on introducing more features in the future, but even as it stands, I think it’s a useful tool for your iGoogle page, or if you’re a hyperlocal blogger, a great way to add up-to-date and relevant info to your blog.

By the way, you can see the code behind the gadget at http://openlylocal.com/tools/gadget.xml (it basically makes a single call to an OpenlyLocal API url — http://openlylocal.com/councils/%5Bcouncil_id%5D.json — and then builds the gadget using javascript) and I’ll be creating a github project for it so you can help improve it/report bugs/request features.

The next step in making info more available is a Ning app, as quite a few hyperlocal sites seem to be using Ning as their platform of choice, and there’s someone who’s promised to write a WordPress plugin to provide the same or similar functionality to the gadget.

UPDATE:

As Helen reported in the comments, the gadget wasn’t working in Internet Explorer. Debugging it was not a pleasant process, but I’ve now found and fixed the bug (I believe). Let me know in the comments if the are any probs. It might take an hour or so before Google updates its cache with the latest code, but then should be fine.

Open Data Feeds from Councils: brain dump

This post is something of a brain dump about some possible common principles for open data for Local Authorities. It’s pretty much the text of a post I made to the tyoc google group, which is helping to organise a TheyWorkForYou-type website for Manchetser County Council.

It’s probably not the first post on the subject (link to other ones welcome), and certainly won’t be the last, but hopefully will provide some useful thoughts for those councils or groups working on exposing their data. (Maybe if there’s anyone else interested we can get this a bit more formalized.)

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My thoughts have been influenced by exposing the data from OpenlyLocal.com and also from consuming XML data from other authorities, but obviously these are only my initial ideas, and I’m using as an example OpenlyLocal urls and also those for Lichfield District Council, who’s got a great webmaster who kindly exposed all the council democratic data they could as XML.

1. The api should expose the authority’s internal UIDs (as well as the id of the record in the application if it’s not the council exposing the data). The idea is to open up the data, not creating another walled garden. See http://openlylocal.com/members/3114.xml and http://www.lichfielddc.gov.uk/site/custom_scripts/meetings_committees…
2. UIDs should be absolutely unique to the object being exposed and should not change if the name changes (so no strings for councillor IDs, as these can change if the councillors name changes, e.g. through marriage, titles or simply what they prefer to be known as).
3. The api should use and expose common identifiers when possible to allow definitive identification, e.g. Wards should expose the ONS Snac Ids. E.g. http://openlylocal.com/wards/982.xml
4. The api should given information about when the object was last updated. At the moment on OpenlyLocal, all objects have created_at and updated_at fields exposed. However, given OpenlyLocal.com and the ‘Your MCC’ projects are basically proxies we should possibly also expose a “last_checked_at” field, so the timeliness can be worked out.