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If you have any thoughts or ideas about how we could improve Open Kent, or any issues with the website, please contact us.
Introduction to Open Kent
Open Kent is a powerful and innovative online platform through which public sector agencies in Kent can share opendata with members of the public. It enables data owners from within Kent Connects partners to upload data in a cost effective way, and it enables members of the public to view and download the data for reuse in whatever way they wish. All the data on Open Kent is open and re-usable in line with the Open Government Licence. The system does also source some data on the web from other local and central government open data stores such as www.data.gov.uk.
Kent Connects is the lead technology partnership for Kent and Medway. Partners include all the local authorities across the county, Kent Fire & Rescue and the Kent Police Authority.
Kent Connects partners felt that it was important that Kent residents should be able to access information and data easily, and that by giving better access to information from partners this would help to improve relationships with local residents through a more informed conversation. To this end, the development of the Open Kent concept was commissioned in September 2010 by Kent Connects to provide the platform for its partner organisations to publish their open data in a single place and enable their customers to access and reuse it.
Want to view our open data?
Check out the drop down menu on the front page where you can select open data by local area. If you know what you’re looking for, go straight to our search function.
Currently, we have open data on expenditure, population demographics, economic activity, food and hygiene, empty commercial properties, funding, location of services, performance of our services and traffic. As this is a trial we do not currently have all public open data on all of the services right across the county. We are working with our partners to make more of it available.
But we need your help too! We’d like to hear from you what non-personal information you’d like to be published, leave a comment or email us.
Want to start creating maps and charts?
If you would like to make use of the open data from Open Kent to create maps or charts, there are various tools you can use such as Fusion Tables, Many Eyes and Yahoo Pipes. You can start by visualising a selection of the data we prepared earlier here or watch the video below on how you can create an example of a visualisation called a bubble diagram.
Not sure how to use open data?
If you want to find out about using open data, please see this guide for more information on the tools and this website for how you can use public service data.
We will be blogging how people are using different types of open data in diverse ways so you can see how to make the data on Open Kent really come alive.
Want to upload data?
If you are a Kent Connects partner (see here for list of partners) and would like to upload or download data and create visualisations, please contact us for a login.
If you've already been provided with a login, please click here. If you are an organisation that isn’t part of Kent Connects and have made available open data, we’d love to hear from you.
