Scotland’s Improvement Service has opened up its Spatial Hub for utilities providers to share data with public sector organisations.
The country’s support agency for local government has developed a web platform for the hub – which provides a single point of access to data from all of Scotland’s local authorities in a consistent format – and come to a data sharing agreement with gas supplier SGN.
This will involve the hub securely hosting the company’s gas network data and making it available to all those in local government who need access. In return, SGN now has full access to all local authority data published by the Spatial Hub.
The Improvement Service has also said it hopes other utility companies and other organisations will be interested in similar data sharing deals using the channel.
It added that the move was prompted by approaches over the past three years, from local government and utilities firms, about how they could access each other’s spatial data more easily and securely.
The Spatial Hub was launched in 2017 and now has 37 national datasets on subjects such as planning, the environment and transport, and its data is being used by around 100 public sector organisations.
Image by Milosz1, CC BY 2.0
