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Manchester Council offers public data for download

Manchester Council has begun releasing council data in open formats.Since Tuesday, the open data section of the website has carried data on subjects such as benefits reception points, locations of motorcycle and disabled parking in the city centre and the locations for mobile library stops.
Written by Jack Clark, Contributor

Manchester Council has begun releasing council data in open formats.

Since Tuesday, the open data section of the website has carried data on subjects such as benefits reception points, locations of motorcycle and disabled parking in the city centre and the locations for mobile library stops.

The publication of this data is part of a "first phase" in open data publication, a Manchester Council spokeswoman told ZDNet UK on Wednesday, with a second phase due to arrive in December. This phase will comprise of financial information, along with other data, she said, however "the content of that is still under review".

The data is published in three major formats: CSV, KML and XML. CSV (Comma/Character Separated Value) datasets store data in a simple text format. KML (Keyhole Markup Language) is an XML-based scheme for publishing geographic information for use with a variety of mapping systems including Bing Maps and Google Maps. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a format whose specification is set by the W3c (World Wide Web Consortium) for exchanging information.

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