… more from Ordnance Survey

I’ve just had another reply from Ordnance Survey, which I think, due to its clarity, draws a line under something – namely councils publishing the OS public toilet point data as OpenData, even though the council know where their toilets are, and, indeed, put them there in the first place.

(unless you choose a different interpretation of the licence, which is none of my business.).

I’ve published their response first, as it’s more interesting. My email that they’re responding to is afterwards, and a little grumpier than I care for.

… more Open Data Councils

I’ve been doing some housekeeping

Namely making a spreadsheet of all the councils that I’ve contacted to ask if they would be able to make a dataset of info about their public toilets (location, opening hours etc) so that people who wish to make maps and apps to find toilets can make better ones.

I gave myself a fighting chance by only contacting councils that already publish some other free-to-use datasets (‘open data’) on their web pages, based on this list at openlylocal.com.

Anyway, here’s my spreadsheet for anyone into these things.

It’s interesting (no, really) because I included notes about the councils’ responses.

Link to my public toilet open data spreadsheet in Google Docs. 

I’m trying really hard to focus on all the helpful councils that created data or even explained forlornly why they could not. 

… Inclusive Design

The problem with a blog about public toilets is that I can’t just write about anything – it’s meant to be loo-related.

My current strop about my walk to work relates to pedestrian-friendly cities, urban design and inclusive design, as do public toilets, so I reckon that’s enough to tie it in. For anyone who disagrees, I’ll add a loo-count*

Yesterday I made a map of my walk to work, showing the pedestrian crossings at crossroads (and one busy side street). Green is a pedestrian crossing at a traffic light, red is no crossing, and yellow is a zebra crossing.

Click map to enlarge