Your Council’s Planning Data Is Open. What About Everything Else?

What Irish local authorities can publish beyond spatial data.

Most Irish local authorities already publish spatial data. Planning applications, boundaries, protected structures and roads sit on your GIS platform, and much of it reaches data.gov.ie, which checks it on a schedule and copies the metadata across, so once it’s set up, you don’t have to do anything.

The rest of what you hold, service statistics, registers, grant records, library figures, sensor readings, sits in departmental systems and spreadsheets across the council. There’s no equivalent route set up for it, so it stays where it is.

What some councils already publish

Find out what you have

Every one of these councils started by working out what data existed across their departments and what state it was in. It’s the same exercise you’d run for your own council, and it comes before any decision about platforms.

The Kildare inventory gives a sense of what the exercise turns up:

• 14 divisions covered
• 262 datasets found, of which 96 could be published as open data
• most departments already publishing 30% to 50% of what they held
• the Arts department’s data the most requested by other parts of the council
• format, storage location, owner and maintenance recorded for each dataset

What it produced was a list the council could act on: what to publish first, what needed cleaning up, and what should stay internal.

Then decide where it goes

Three arrangements are already working for Irish local authorities:

Which one fits depends on how many datasets your inventory finds, who’s going to keep them up to date, and how much you want to run in-house.

What Derilinx does

Derilinx has been working with Irish local authorities on open data and data sharing for over ten years, from early data inventories through to portals and dashboards.

• Data Inventory Assessment: a department-by-department listing of what data exists, its format, its owner and whether it’s already published
• Data Publication Plan: which datasets go where, in what order, with what metadata and approvals
• A hosted open data and data sharing portal that data.gov.ie harvests from, with dashboards built in; Kildare, Limerick, Cork and Dublinked all run on this platform
• Data visualisation that turns raw datasets into dashboards people can actually explore, the kind of storytelling behind Cork’s dashboards

Every council’s starting point looks different. If you are not sure where to start, we’re happy to help you figure it out.