Making a difference with data

EduBase is the government’s database of all the educational establishments in England and Wales. Schools, colleges, universities, specialist schools and more are all listed in there, with details on . It was one of the datasets shared for the ‘Show Us A Better Way’ competition in 2008, and a number of high-profile open data applications featured on data.gov.uk are based on EduBase data, such as Schools Finder. Yet if you search for EduBase on data.gov.uk you won’t find a thing. And the data released under Show Us A Better Way has disappeared off the web.

On the website of EduBase, where you can search online for the data, you will find details of how to subscribe to get ‘two free extracts a year’ from the dataset, but only if you agree to the terms including a big bold statement that “The data downloaded using this service should not be sold or disseminated to any third party.”. (And when you do get to access an extract of the data, you have to keep the number of entries below 65,000 for the sake of Excel users). If you want regularly updated data from EduBase more than twice a year (say, for keeping track of schools becoming academies, or tracking changes in school information), then you’ll need to pay thousands of pounds a year for the privilege.

Oddly, whilst you need to register for the official EduBase, and EduBase is not itself listed on Data.gov.uk, when you turn to the Linked Data section of Data.gov.uk you will find ‘Education’ as one of the categories - and - it turns out - the linked data is direct from EduBase. Well, I say is; I really mean was - as data.gov.uk notes that it’s now over a year out of date. So whilst Stuart Harrison’s handy tools for turning edubase linked data into KML for mapping, the many sample queries for finding the information you want, and the linked data API which allows you to browse the data, all appear to be open (and the linked data would appear to be governed, according to the data.gov.uk terms and conditions and the Open Government License) if you want to check out how many schools have recently turned into academies in your local area, or to track the emergence of free schools using open education data, it seems that right now you are out of luck.

So - right now your options if you want to explore EduBase data are:

• Register with the EduBase Website and get the latest data, but only under non-commercial terms - and through a clunky interface.

or,

• Use the out-of-date linked data, which will necessitate learning at least a bit of SPARQL if you want to do more than grab extracts through the linked data API

Surely EduBase should be more open than this?