Scotland’s Spatial Information Service (SIS) has struck a deal for the country’s academic sector to have access to data on its Spatial Hub.
SIS, which is within the Improvement Service for local government in Scotland, has signed a partnership agreement with EDINA (an Edinburgh University centre of data and digital excellence) to enable it to share Spatial Hub data with universities and colleges.
The hub brings together and standardises spatial data from Scottish local authorities to produce national datasets that can be shared more widely.
Until now most of the 36 national datasets had only been accessible to members of the One Scotland Mapping Agreement (primarily the public sector). But the Improvement Service said it has had many requests by academics and researchers over the past three years for many of the national datasets, and that the new arrangement will make it possible to share the data.
EDINA will now begin offering the Spatial Hub datasets to the academic community via its DigiMap service, which already provides much of Ordnance Survey’s digital data directly to academia for education and research purposes.
The Improvement Service has made spatial data one its priority areas over recent months. In April it announced that it would spread £250,000 of funding between local authorities to improve their datasets; and it recently opened up the Spatial Hub for utilities providers.
Image by macroflight, CC BY-2.0 through flickr
