Open Plaques is an open source project (both code and data) has data on over three and a half thousand commemorative plaques, and new plaques are being added regularly. Where available, the data for each plaque includes the:
- Inscription
- Person being commemorated
- Geo location
- Address / country
- Organisation that created the plaque (around 250 so far)
- Colour
- Roles (e.g. author, inventor, actor, prime minister, namer of clouds etc.)
- Verbs (e.g. lived, worked, died, visited, built, founded) that link the person to the location
- Link to creative commons photo of plaque on Flickr
Most of the page views on the site have .xml .json .kml views, just add the extension to the url.
Another very useful query is the 'box' query. Specify two geopoints, top-left and bottom-right and get returned all the plaques in that bounded box, e.g. http://openplaques.org/plaques.kml?box=[51.5482,-0.1617],[51.5282,-0.1217] or http://openplaques.org/plaques.json?box=[51.5482,-0.1617],[51.5282,-0.1217]
A kml view can be piped directly in Google Maps, e.g. http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=http://openplaques.org/plaques.kml?box=[51.5482,-0.1617],[51.5282,-0.1217]
The API is far from complete, but it is usable as we have two main users: Flickr and the openplaques iphone app. Simon and Jez should be at the hack day so chat with them if you have any thoughts.
Tom Morris has recently been doing some work to add RDF data so that records can be linked to Freebase, etc.
Newspaper and Journal archives
Archives of newspaper and science journals (eg http://www.nature.com/nature/archive/index.html not free unfortunately) are useful for cross-references (@zzgavin)
History data from the Guardian
There's tonnes of data on the Guardian site now - you can access most of it at: Guardian.co.uk/data
A lot of the data is time series. Here are a few to get started with:
London Blitz 1940: the first day's bomb attacks listed in full
Every prisoner of war camp in the UK mapped and listed
UK marriage rates back to 1862
UK inflation since 1948
Interest rates since 1694
English Heritage monument data
English Heritage monument data is available as ESRI shapefiles. Their use is 'generally unrestricted' as long as it is not 'used for purposes which may lead to damage to archaeological sites, historic buildings and landscapes'. Includes listed buildings, scheduled monuments etc, with a little bit of data (date of scheduling, listing grade etc). http://services.english-heritage.org.uk/NMRDataDownload/ Needs a login, but is easy to obtain (and I have one!) @mdgreaney
I have this data as points for the centre of each NMR, which has also been converted to lat/lon and WOEID, if anyone is interested. Currently using it to work out if detecting is happening in the vicinity of scheduled sites. @portableant
Historical theatrical data
http://theatricalia.com/ contains information about nearly 20,000 productions involving over 60,000 people at over 1,500 theatres. The earliest production currently in the system is from 1660: http://theatricalia.com/play/8/othello/production/ncj - possibly the first time a professional actress appeared on a public stage in England.
Ordnance Survey gazeteer
OS 1:50K gazetteer - has antiquities and Roman sites. Also converted to Yahoo WOEID. You can get the original dataset from http://parlvid.mysociety.org:81/os/ and I can send you my enhanced data. @portableant
UK Parliament data
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com has speeches, questions, written answers and ministerial statements from parliament going from 1802-2005 - it's about 95% complete. It also has a basic REST API at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/api.
Current Commons Hansard can be found, officially, at http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/hansard/commons/, and current Lords Hansard can be found at http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/hansard/lords/. Scottish Parliamentary reports can be found at http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/business/officialReports/. Welsh Assembly reports can be found at http://www.assemblywales.org/bus-home/bus-record-of-proceedings.htm. The Northern Ireland Assembly is at http://www.niassembly.gov.uk/ .
If what you want is within Commons debates back to 1935, Commons written answers/statements/public bill committees back to 2001, Lords back to 1999, or anything in the Northern Ireland Assembly debates or Scottish Parliament official report, you can use TheyWorkForYou and its API. It also has knowledge of MPs back to 1805ish, with a few corrections on top of the hansard.millbanksystems.com data.
UK government data
There's the smorgasbord which is http://data.gov.uk/.
Also of interest are the Gazettes (London, Edinburgh, Belfast) which are the records of things happening - legislation enacted, company insolvencies and all sorts of interesting bits and bobs which have to be officially recorded and published:
Old Bailey Online
Old Bailey Online (http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/) has records of about 200,000 criminal trials conducted at the Old Bailey between 1674 and 1913.
London Lives
London Lives (http://www.londonlives.org/) has a collection of 3.35 million names associated with 240,000 documents, coming from 1690 to 1800.
The National Maritime Museum could make the following datasets available if there's interest (@foe):
Research databases
- Maritime Memorials (approx. 5,000 records, which can be retrieved via a simple API by ID, word/phrase or KML endpoint)
- Marine Society’s registers for boys sent to the Royal Navy during the Seven Years War. They're interesting as a history of the poor and for genealogists in search of an ancestor who went to sea as a boy (approx. 5,000 records, available as CSV)
- Database of Royal Navy victualling during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars 1793–1815: (Sustaining the Empire, over 4,000 records, available as an Access database)
- Warship histories circa 1500 to 1950, detailing captain, where the ships went and the vessels they encountered (approx. 65,000 records, available as CSV)
Transcripts
The National Archives
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ is the UK government's official archive, containing over 1,000 years of history, with detailed guidance to government departments and the public sector on information management and links to other historical archives.
We are currently working to make available the following data sets. (Note: This is a provisional list and may change). Please do get in touch with me @mentionthewar if there's something you're particularly interested in working with so we can focus our efforts a bit.
- Complete dump of our catalogue (hold tight it's apparently 10.5GB)
- Selected (more manageable) catalogue subsets (medieval petitions, Victorian photographers and others)
- Full OCR'd text of the Cabinet Papers (covering Cabinet Meetings 1916-79)
- Full transcribed text of MH 12, Victorian poor law and workhouse records
- Our growing gazetteer relating historic placenames to modern ones
- Data from the Domesday Book (I need to check what we have available)
- Geodata for Dixon-Scott collection of UK interwar photographs
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