Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Andy D'Agorne on February 21, 2012 at 15:33

The data is available real time on the National Air Quality site run by DCLG for two of the monitors -Bootham and Fishergate. The Jorair York council website is good but a lot of it has not been updated in the past year.

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Permalink Reply by Andyd on March 4, 2012 at 17:06

We have officers in the council responsible for writing intermnible reports each year on Air quality and analysis of the data (showing how it is getting worse but nothing is done about it) so why are they not being asked to contribute to this discussion? I thought the idea of this genius york thing was to bring the top brains in York to identify solutions, yet the people who are the experts dont seem to be taking part, so not sure that there is much point to it beyond some fine spin about the council 'doing something' - thats me off the invite list!

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Permalink Reply by Heather Niven on March 14, 2012 at 15:11

Hi Andy,

Anyone is welcome to join the discussion. With our small pilot budget from NESTA and the councils contribution, we are trying to spread the word far and wide. If you know of anyone who could make a positive contribution to the ideas here please urge them to join us. 

If this is an area that could be better mapped and measured and that can be scaled up to national comparison, then that sounds brill. Can we find a way to make that happen?

Look forward to meeting you at Thursdays challenge 4 workshop!

H

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Permalink Reply by Chris Wedgwood on March 14, 2012 at 16:41

Hi Heather,

This site is great!

I've only submitted a few ideas so far and I'm already getting a free lunch tomorrow. :)

If it can generate some novel ways of looking at thorny issues, then I think a lot of good can come out of it.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Wedgwood on March 12, 2012 at 20:55

Is there no UK wide repository for all this data?

The site Heather posted has lots of data but it's all from London and only 6 types of measurement at each.

I tried to Google 'National Air Quality site run by DCLG' mentioned below, looking for the York data but came up blank. 

DEFRA has a bit more data still, Bristol publish on http://data.gov.uk and every other council seems to have their own website for their own local measurements.

Maybe everyone should get together and agree a standard way of reporting and making the data available?

Wasn't that the whole point of data.gov.uk in the first place?

There could well be all sorts of valuable information that could be computationally extracted by comparing datasets and seeing how they differ and how policy interventions affect pollution levels, and providing forecasts to residents, but the data needs to be available first in a usable format. I'm sure something could be done with limited data, but it would be of less use than having data from the whole of the UK. 

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Permalink Reply by Andyd on March 12, 2012 at 23:57

Agree with Chris - the Jorair website for York looks very impressive until you open the 'real time' data section and find that its mostly still 'under construction' -and the most recent full report is at least a year old. The download data havent been updated since 2009 (perhaps because since last year they would show us in breach of EU directives on air quality?!) 

 The council is required to report to government each year in April so there should be an update report going through the council committee structure soon before being submitted.

Here is the most recent for 2011  http://www.jorair.co.uk/reports/progress/2011/City%20of%20York%20Co...

In terms of looking at impacts of traffic changes I had hoped we could get a really interesting picture of what effect the closure of Gillygate (for roadworks) had on air quality. When I asked about the data from this period however I was told that the monitor had been taken out of service for maintenance!!  

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Permalink Reply by Chris Wedgwood on March 14, 2012 at 16:26

It's encouraging that the Jorair website has a real-time results section even though it currently doesn't work. Does anyone know the E.T.A for this feature to be completed on the website? 'Under construction' is a bit vague. 

At least that is an indication that the monitoring stations are capable of sending out real-time results. (Surely they would not start to create a website to show them and then find out they didn't!)

If the data is automatically coming in from the monitoring stations it shouldn't be a problem to b*** it all in a database and allow people to query/download up to date historical data without human intervention. I'm guessing that hasn't been done because as Andyd says the data only goes up to 2009. 

Also, if the objective is to use the data computationally then adding a web service API could well be advantageous.

I would have thought creating something to work Nationally wouldn't really require much more than creating something locally. It would just need more computing/data storage and the buy-in of other local authorities, which may be the hardest stumbling block to overcome.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Wedgwood on March 14, 2012 at 16:53

Just to add; That wasn't a swear word..I'm not sure why it's been censored.

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Permalink Reply by Heather Niven on March 14, 2012 at 18:46

Not seeing anything censored at this end Chris? Thanks for the response.  This is quite interesting. http://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/ 

Note: this thread isn't part of the NESTA 4 challenges but from the discussion area of the site.  It is becoming clear through the discussions though that there is an opportunity here if no one else is measuring this to think about York leading the way - maybe you Chris?!

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Permalink Reply by Chris Wedgwood on March 15, 2012 at 11:26

Hi Heather,

I'll see you at the event this afternoon and we can throw some ideas about.

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