The Spatial Hub is developed and maintained by the Improvement Service. The Spatial Hub collects together data on a whole host of topics from local authorities and other partner organisations, transforms and joins it all together to form Scotland-wide datasets and publishes them in different ways for the rest of the data community to access and use.
This can save each of these organisations a great deal of time, money and effort in developing their own data sharing solutions and also begins to help standardise much of the data and how it is maintained and shared.
Why?
Scottish local government creates masses of data in the course of providing public services and delivering Scottish Government policy. Most of this data is collected for a single purpose, with no standardisation or thought about how it could be better used, especially for differing purposes.
Proven
The Spatial Hub copies the blueprint and successes of the One Scotland Gazetteer – Scotland’s national address and street register, bringing much of this important and valuable local government (and National Park authority) data together to make it more useful, accessible and valuable to the entire data community.
Improvements
We believe that, as the perception and usage of these datasets increase, so should standards around them and their quality.
How?
We rely on local authority data experts providing us with their data, through the Spatial Hub submissions. We then transform and process the data at regular intervals, making it available through this portal.
The data publication standards that we have adopted (including metadata records on the Scottish Spatial Data Infrastructure and web services) help Scottish local authorities meet their legal EU INSPIRE obligations.
Access
Currently, all Scottish public sector bodies and their contractors can access and use Spatial Hub data for their business purposes (under the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement).
The Spatial Hub datasets can also be accessed by the academic community via EDINA‘s Digimap service.