A wish list for geodata on FixMyStreet

I was just talking to someone in a local council about the fact that they’d opened up the location of 27,000 streetlights in their council area. They wanted to know if FixMyStreet could incorporate them so that problem reports could be more accurately attached.

This conversation reminded me that we’ve had an informal wish list of geodata for FixMyStreet for some time. What we need is more data that lets us send problems to the correct entity when the problem is not actually a council responsibility.

I’m just posting these up to see if anyone knows a guy who knows a girl who knows a dog who knows how to get hold of any of these datasets. In some vector data format, if possible, please!

  • Canals and responsible authorities
  • Supermarkets (esp car parks) and responsible companies
  • Network Rail’s land
  • Council owned land
  • Land and roads controlled by the Highways agency
  • Shopping malls
  • National parks
  • BT phone boxes (the original problem which inspired FixMyStreet)

So, do you know someone who might know someone who can help us improve FixMyStreet? And guess what, if we do add this to our web services, you’ll probably be able to query them too.

6 Comments

  1. I’ve requested a GIS-dump of the Highways Agency roads & land:

    http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/highways_agency_managed_roads

    There are PDFs of their bridges here, with Northing/Easting, which could be useful, so I’ve also asked them for a CSV version.
    [broken link removed]

    I did find out that trunk roads (ie which will include the Highways Agency ones) are flagged as such in the free OS datasets (Meridian 2 & OS Vectormap District), but I’m not sure if they’ll be at detailed enough levels for FixMyStreet. I think they’re stored as lines rather than shapes.
    http://data.gov.uk/ideas/road-network-available-gis-format

    Cheers
    Alex

  2. Some of this data may be published in a more directly accessible form as part of “UK Location”, discoverable through data.gov.uk next year. Initially OGC WMS, then Download services (shape files, OGC WFS). Unfortunately not necessarily all under the OGL. And I guess you will need the relevant attribute information to tie it back to the contact point responsible for the upkeep of the ‘real world object’. This may not necessarily be in the published service.