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We're not being threatened with Open Data (yet - I suspect it's only a matter of time...) But we publish our Monument records on Heritage Gateway. A couple of years ago we inserted a line of code in HBSMR so the GIS polygons contain embedded hyperlinks to the corresponding Gateway page for each record. When we're asked for bulk searches I can send the GIS files containing hyperlinks (if it’s a spatial search) or extract the Table data from the GIS to a csv/xls file (if it’s a request for all records of a particular Monument Type or Period). Contractors still ask for full database extracts as PDF, but being able to send the data out to students etc. as a single file that redirects them to the public version of the records makes my (and apparently their!) life much easier Rod Millard Historic Environment Record Officer Planning and Transport Development Bath and North East Somerset Council Lewis House Manvers Street Bath BA1 1JG Tel: 01225 477653 Fax: 01225 477663 Email: [log in to unmask] Web: http://www.bathnes.gov.uk/services/tourism-and-heritage/archaeology Office Hours: Tuesday to Thursday, 10:00 am – 4:30 pm Making Bath & North East Somerset an even better place to live, work and visit. -----Original Message----- From: Issues related to Historic Environment Records [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Richard Watts Sent: 23 November 2017 08:48 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Help with Open Data exports Hello all, I'm hoping I can get your collective advice, if you wouldn't mind, in regard of publishing data on Open Data platforms. Lincolnshire County Council have (fairly) recently set up an Open Data platform, where they intend to share a whole range of different datasets (ranging from taxi licenses issued, to school admissions for each year, etc.), and we are being asked (in a way that suggests we don't really have much of a choice) whether we would like to supply historic environment data. The data would need to be supplied to the Open Data team as a csv file (or possibly as HTML, though I think they would greatly prefer csv). I completely agree with the principle of sharing as much of our data as possible (whenever we actually can, and with the obvious caveats you'd usually expect…), and lots of our data is already available via Heritage Gateway and our own LCC website, 'Lincs to the Past'. I know that a fair number of you out there have already sent over data to your respective Open Data platforms, and I've actually managed to access a few of them and have had a look at what you have published. Now please don't take this the wrong way, but every one that I've been able to see is frankly a bit rubbish, and I'm struggling to see the point of providing data like this – no member of the public is going to trawl through thousands of lines of csv entries, manually searching for the bits of data that might be relevant to them – not when the data is already available and presented in a far more user-friendly way on Heritage Gateway, or when they can just ask us directly! I suppose that there's a more convincing argument that a specialist data company could download the whole dataset and do some interesting data analytics with it, although it would probably save them a lot of time and effort if they also just came to us directly, and we could (and already often do!) help with the more complicated searches. I'm sorry for the slight rant there – maybe there are a lot of benefits to this that I'm not appreciating. I suppose what I'm really asking is, is there any way to supply this data (as csv) that will actually be useful to people? We're getting some pressure to release at least something to the Open Data platform, and so have indicated that we could probably publish our Monument and Event data. If anyone could offer some advice on how they went about publishing their data in this manner (especially with the technical part of actually exporting it – we use HBSMR and Mapinfo here in Lincolnshire – I'm assuming you use the export function in the main search form to export the data as a Dublin Core csv?), we would be very grateful! I hope that's alright! Many thanks in advance for any help you could provide at all! Richard Watts