Why not Getting it is Great
We’ve already talked about why transparency isn’t open data and open data isn’t INSPIRE. This week, we are honing-in on INSPIRE’s true purpose by sharing with you an INSPIRE good news story.
INSPIRE was created for European government departments and 3rd parties to be able to access the data catalogues needed to facilitate large projects. And so, data.gov.uk became, among other things, the catalogue for UK INSPIRE data.
Recently, a representative of a large supermarket chain (we’ll let you guess which one…) requested parking zones data from a London council who were using our INSPIRE DataPublisher Service.
So the supermarket asked, the council said no… and we said YEAH!
Eh?
Yes, you read correctly. We had a little celebration.
INSPIRE is a catalogue that lets commercial and government organisations know who owns the data and what it’s about. The fact that the supermarket looked for a specific dataset and found exactly where it was stored, what it was for, and who owned it. That’s a success by INSPIRE standards! The catalogue did exactly what it needed to, bang on.
And here’s some more food for thought: the supermarket was able to make the request to the data owner easily. The ease of requesting was due to the landing page in place which provides a form to make a request & filter users.
Again the differences between INSPIRE and open data are made apparent here. If the data the supermarket requested was open data and the request was declined, the setup would have failed in its duty to provide the data to anybody who asked for it.
So we’ll say it again. Open data isn’t INSPIRE.