Subject: [mySociety:public] Suggestion for project: Common Land data From: CountCulture <[email protected]> Date: Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:26:32 +0100
To: mySociety:Public <[email protected]> This may have been suggested before, but has anyone investigated doing an online directory of Common Land (and Village Greens). It would probably be a fairly meaty project -- the data is maintained by the councils (though not available online), and also there's aggregated data that's available only through a very bad map (with all sorts of reuse restrictions at): http://www.openaccess.gov.uk/S4/html/LWWCM/Section4/GeneralContent/MappingAccessLand.html There's also an organisation of the people that maintain the register at: http://www.acraew.org.uk/ Two obvious approaches: 1) Go after the data held by Natural England and get it freed up, by pressure of govt/politicians, FoI requests or reverse engineering the openaccess.gov.uk data (this may be problematic as the map data is probably tied up with the OS-nonsense) 2) Crowd source getting the info from councils I've got my hands full with OpenlyLocal.com at the moment, but would love to see this info freed up (and would provide server space if it helped). Any takers? C <snip> I don't believe the Open Spaces Society has much in the way of a database, but it would be worth checking what they may have databased, and in what form. The following gives at least a feel for the scale of the challenge. It may be that they would be interested and whilst very constrained for resources might have some ways of helping. They say, for example, that they are 'recognised in that we are consulted on all applications for works on, and exchanges of, common land.' And that 'There are 1.3 million acres of common land in England and Wales, registered in over 9,000 separate units covering all types of landscape and habitat. A staggering 88 per cent of all commons in England have a national or international designation – for wildlife, landscape or archaeology.' And on village greens (one has recently been established in Camden, by the way) ' A green is any land on which a significant number of inhabitants of any area has indulged in lawful sports and pastimes, for 20 years, as of right. We believe there to be about 3650 registered greens in England and about 220 in Wales, covering about 8150 and 620 acres respectively.' http://www.oss.org.uk/ Dominic _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
