Darllenwch y dudalen hon yn Cymraeg

#LoveData23

February may be the time for romance, but it’s not all about hearts and flowers. St Valentine is sharing the spotlight with Love Data Week!

Love Data Week is an international celebration of data, taking place every year during the week of Valentine’s Day. Universities, non-profit organisations, government agencies, corporations and individuals are encouraged to host and participate in data-related events and activities.

As it is Love Data Week, Natural Resources Wales (NRW) is taking the opportunity to tell our customers that we have now fully moved all our data from the Lle GeoPortal to DataMapWales. Although many of NRW’s customers may have organically started using the new platform, we have now updated our website and discovery metadata to signpost to DataMapWales.

The story so far

Since September, when DataMapWales went live, we have been working closely with the Welsh Government to migrate, update and improve our data holdings. We have converted some of the data to a geospatial format (where previously it wasn’t) and have added extra datasets.

New NRW datasets include more ecological data, more data about our forestry estate, drainage districts and water resources, all of which is available under an Open Government Licence.

By ensuring our data is available for re-use in an accessible way, NRW can help decision makers, scientists, and policy makers by giving them the right data to guide changes and issues that matter to Wales.

In the spirit of Love Data Week, here are some things we also love about DataMapWales. We hope users and other potential data providers will love them too.

• Our staff can “try before we buy”, by viewing data provided by other public bodies in Wales alongside our own data to decide if it will be useful in our internal system.
• We can use data from public bodies using Web Mapping Services (WMS) which save us time and effort in managing data and we know we always have the latest copy available. It also helps us avoid duplicating data as we can manage this process centrally.
• By providing NRW data to DataMapWales, it provides transparency on our data holdings as well as removing the need for our staff to manually supply data to others multiple times and in different formats, freeing up time to deal with more complex data requests and queries.
• We can group data layers under single catalogue entries, ensuring our data is easier to find. We plan to make more use of this feature in future.
• We are part of a community of stakeholders and can feed requests for improvement and developments to the Welsh Government.
• We are excited to see upcoming new functionality, particularly in relation to the provision of raster data.

Share your stories

We will be adding more data to DataMapWales over the next few months and would love to hear from you. You can email us at opendata@cyfoethnaturiolcymru.gov.uk  to let us know how you are making use of our existing data to benefit the people of Wales or wider. You can also tell us if there are data we manage that you would like to see us make available.   Customers can also find further information about how to access all of NRW’s open and non-open data through the NRW website Natural Resources Wales / Accessing our data.

Post by, Monica, Natural Resources Wales