Who can use the data and how?

anyone can, it is free!

Public Domain Licencing

Please re-use the data in any way you see fit. The data is released under the Public Domain Dedication and License 1.0 and we make no claims of copyright over either the data we've collected ourselves, nor the hundreds of hours of collective value that have been added by our co-curators. That said, we can accept no liability for any issues that may arise over the re-use of this data, and you are advised to make your own assessment. We would love it if you acknowledged Open Plaques and link back to us - but you are under no obligation to do so.
We obtain information from local lists published on the internet (council web sites, civic society pages, etc). We do not copy from other plaque collecting sites. We ask competing sites to accord us the same respect.

Datapulls

Datapulls are run on an ad-hoc basis. Plaque id numbers do not change, but very occasionally we delete a duplicate record. The fields are fairly stable, but subject to change. You might want to design your app so that you can reload data from the next update.

Problems

If you have difficulty loading or manipulating any of these datadumps then please do tell us. We cannot fix it if we do not know.

Photo licences

We do not store photographs on our site. We connect and add context to existing resources on the web instead. We supply links to images so that you could display them within your own app with the appropriate attribution.
Some images are 'non-commercial' and you should consider whether to display them or not.

Geocoding

Geodata is obtained either from the position data of a Creative Commons licenced image or through manual geocoding by our volunteer co-curators. We regard all of our data to be clean of copyright and 100% in the Public Domain.

OpenStreetMap

There has been discussion over whether to simply include our data within OpenStreetMap. The jury is still out on this one.

API calls

The official API is shaping up and you should find JSON, GEOJSON, and CSV representations of many pages if you send the appropriate Accept: headers (or add .json to the URL). Some of the HTML pages contain microformats too. If you're interested in any specific data, or a specific format, please let us know.
The live API has a default limit of 500 records, so that our servers can cope. An area can be queried with a bounding box, such as Newcastle district by specifying the top-left and bottom-right corners of a box.
Be gentle with us, don't crawl our entire site, we run all this on a shoestring budget and you might crash our servers. We will run a new datapull for you by request.

Provenance

2009 - We started with a list of London blue plaques donated to us by English Heritage. 2009 - Information was obtained from local authorities via polite Freedom of Information requests (with mixed results). 2009 - These 'official' data sources were cleaned up, parsed and improved through a number of automatic and semi-manual processes. 2009 - Open Plaques site was officially launched after Yahoo! OpenHack London. 2009 - We then collected via our Open Plaques Flickr pool and the Blue Plaques Flickr pool. 2012 - Our community of plaque hunters locate plaques in countries all over the world. 2013 - We appeared in The Sunday Times 'Home' section 2014 - Aimer Media and Shire Publishing collaborated with us on a data donation from a London Blue Plaque book. 2015 - We provide data to the Ordnance Survey for their points of interest product
http://openplaques.org/data
openplaques.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-34
11342
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:QBSLUL2CW2FSPHOI2ESKIJJMOXU7BYKO
<urn:uuid:c1b443b4-1559-426a-946e-6055c89501f3>
2017-08-18T08:35:39Z
54.217.254.88
text/html
sha1:R3PDR7GPBOIL2P3IFYHVN466DK2KO4GH
<urn:uuid:cdc0d497-b6ee-49f0-96a6-30f951007a9a>
http://openplaques.org/data
length
response
<urn:uuid:d7256bda-3bc0-471c-86eb-8c29a013574a>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-65-234-226.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-34
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf