News and updates from Open Innovations in Leeds
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By: Stuart Lowe Last July we described how we'd started making an open archive of Bus Open Data Service (BODS) data because nobody else seemed to be doing that. We used an old 8TB hard drive and set up some scripts to store the daily timetables as well as the live bus locations as both GTFS-RT and SIRI-VM files every 30 seconds. Well, those scripts have been running ever since and the disk will…
By: Kathryn Connell, Paul Connell From May 2026 Open Innovations will not be commencing any new work, we will be archived. All our work - tools, data, blogs and everything else - will remain on our website and in our open repositories for anyone to access, use and share but we will not be actively completing new work. We would like to thank everyone who has been involved and supported what has…
By: Stuart Lowe If you've watched Channel 4's Dirty Business you may be familiar with "storm overflows" - the discharge of sewage into our waterways. If you haven't, it is worth a watch. The Water and Sewerage Companies submit what are known as Event Duration Monitoring data to the Environment Agency as part of their regulatory Annual Return. The Environment Agency then publish yearly summary data…
By: Stuart Lowe A while back someone on Mastodon asked if there was a way to find out which (UK) county they were in with a little bit of Javascript without "the cloud". I made a tool to do just that and this blog post goes into the details. A cloud-free outlook Obviously there are services that will tell you things about a set of coordinates (or for a postcode ) but the person asking the question…
By: Stuart Lowe Over the past few years the cost-of-living crisis and rising energy costs have meant that many people in the UK have struggled to stay warm during the winter months. To address this, many third sector and public sector organisations started creating directories of offers of warm spaces in libraries, community centres, churches etc. This huge effort resulted in well over 150…
By: Stuart Lowe One of the ways we are funded is through our sponsors . Two of our current sponsors - Northern Powergrid and National Grid - work in electricity distribution. Each year they create Future Energy Scenarios (FES/DFES) that model everything from the number of electric vehicles to the amount of solar power generation they expect at different points in the network for every year until…
By: Kathryn Connell Being #RadicallyOpen Welcome to our summer newsletter. As temperatures soar in the UK we have hidden in the shade to write up some of our latest work and the impact we have. Its a short read and we hope it offers some tips and insight. The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information. -- Tim…
By: Luke Strange, Stuart Lowe If you've been following our work for a while you'll know that there are some topics we get very animated about. One of those is buses. We've shared our experiments with bus open data , we've written thoughts on franchising , we've investigated phantom buses, hosted workshops about bus open data , and much more. We think buses are very important. Thanks to the Bus…
