1/2 hour energy data
Is anyone reading this using or in charge of the 1/2 hour energy data that has been made available?
Out of the 18 department head offices that are making the data available, there are a few issues to do with data formatting which need working through
Hi,
Thanks for your interest in these data sets. You can either send your comments/suggestions/questions to team@data.gov.uk or add comments to the relevant data set page - the former is probably the easiest way forward.
Many thanks,
Phil
Thanks Phil
I'll email but also put something here as it is about formats and maybe be interesting more widely...
18 department HQs have made their energy data available.
8 have made it available in a reasonable format such as
http://www.carbonculture.net/orgs/defra/nobel-house/
where this page defines some characteristics of the building (number of people, area etc) and where the gas and electricity are the above link + elec00.csv or + gas00.csv ie
http://www.carbonculture.net/orgs/defra/nobel-house/reports/elec00.csv
http://www.carbonculture.net/orgs/defra/nobel-house/reports/gas00.csv
So all the data is available given one knows the above link.
http://www.carbonculture.net/orgs/decc/whitehall-place/ doesn’t have building information, however.
Of the other 10 buildings, some use ecodriver, ie . http://www.ecodriver.uk.com/MOJ/ They have building data sometimes, but in a different format and they concatenate the gas/elec/water into a single file for a month. Not very useful. The data is better for each meter individually as a file over all time.
Some buildings use stark ie http://www.stark.co.uk/government/dwp.aspx . This doesn’t have building information but does have gas and electricity in well formatted files but with slightly abstract filenames. http://www.stark.co.uk/government/DWP/Reports/DYTS01_kWh.csv for example.
DCLG give a link to their energy analysis provider which then gives a terrible user interface and the ability to manually choose files of data from certain dates and download as zip files! Utterly useless.
Department of Health links to their service provider which demands a login and password! Hardly ‘open data’.
Dept of Education has no building data. It does have a downloadable csv but it again has a 3 meters in 1 file but this time interleaved readings, so not much use.
In summary, it is a good start getting energy data uploaded in near real-time. There needs to be some convergence of formats. Of what has been supplied the best is by carbonculture above, used by 8 departments. Advantages are building information on the main page, 2 files, 1 per meter addressed from the main page plus some extension. All data downloadable and automatable.
The worst are where the link sends to some energy analysis provider user interface.
G.
I think it would be a good idea if the data is in a format where Drupal CMS can process date files in csv format or feeds. Drupal is the way forward for open source data as it is the CMS used to build data.gov.uk according to http://buytaert.net/data-gov-uk-using-drupal. The standard way to import to Drupal is through the Feeds Module. With Drupal there are a choice of Flash or Javascript charts for output, ability to update feeds with Cron, and build SQL queries with Views.
I have built a simple application bvenergysaver which uses data from Ministry of Justice .csv file.There are a few hours of programming and documentation writing required to make the graphs and filter look better, but it would mean that any government office / department could upload the energy data for free.
Hi,
I'd suggest that data.gov.uk are already on the right track: i.e. aim to make all the data available as RDF / SPARQL. IIRC, Drupal 7 will be able to produce and consume RDF(a) pretty much out of the box.
Having looked at the FAQ on this data.gov.uk data in this format should be fine for me with Drupal 6 / 7
I was just wondering if this information has been readily passed on to the tourism sector of the government and if so how is it being implemented.
The reason I ask is that I have been involved in the tourism sector for many years and have found that this is paricular segment of our industry would benefit greatly from this information. Thanks in advance.
sure if thsi information is passed on to the tourist industry it will be a blessing in disguise.
Hello
Nice information.