Office of Public Sector Information

Posted by: Workshop on Finding and Re-using Public Information

Public Sector Information Holder: Local Government Information House (LGIH)

Information Asset: National Street Gazetteer (NSG)

The problem

At the Open Knowledge Foundation Workshop on Finding and Re-using Public Information, a list of 15-20 key government / public datasets were identified. The National Street Gazetteer was one of these. It holds details of every street in England, providing a complete list. It is used as a framework for sharing and integrating data, particularly to support Street Works Notices.

Supply of data from the National Street Gazetteer is on a commercial basis and involves the payment of a significant fee. It would be better if this dataset were made freely available, on the web, to support a variety of other uses.

My ideal solution

Free access to the NSG, particularly for non-commercial or experimental re-use.

What I would do

The NSG is a core dataset which would be useful to support many other types of application, particularly in the transport area. Just the list of cycleways would be useful, say to support cycling community initiatives on the web.