Council open data

Datasets that Trafford Council create and publish, i.e. the council is the source as well as the publisher of the data. Included within this repository is a transparency_code sub-folder, containing those datasets required to be published in order to meet the minimum requirements of the Local Government Transparency Code 2015.

The datasets are usually published on the open data page (or sub-pages) of the Trafford Council website. They are then cleaned and structured as necessary according to our common standard and stored within this repository. An entry for the datasets are created on data.gov.uk pointing to this repository, not the council website.

All datasets are available under an Open Government Licence v3.0 and where possible have a 3 star open data rating because they are in a non-proprietary open format (e.g. CSV or GeoJSON).

For datasets regarding Trafford which are published by an external source, but cleaned and tidied by Trafford Data Lab, please see our open_data repository.

Workflow

1. Create a folder in the council_open_data repository with the name of the dataset in snake case, e.g. senior_salaries.
2. Add a README.md containing dataset metadata.
3. Clean and structure the dataset to a common standard. Keep any R scripts in the folder for re-use.
4. Save the dataset in an open non-proprietary format (e.g. CSV, GeoJSON) with the same name as the folder and if necessary suffix with a date, e.g. senior_salaries_2018-19.csv
5. Create a JSON file containing information about the dataset's variables. Following W3C guidance call the metadata file [dataset_name].[file format]-metadata.json, e.g. senior_salaries.csv-metadata.json. The date suffix is not necessary as the variable names will be the same across releases.
6. Publish the dataset and accompanying JSON metadata on data.gov.uk. Please use the GitHub Pages URL e.g. https://www.trafforddatalab.io/council_open_data/... rather than https://raw.githubusercontent.com/traffordDataLab/council_open_data/....