Once upon a time the Environment Agency published a very useful catalogue of information assets, called the Information for Re-use Register (IfRR).
The IfRR was last updated in July 2014, and formally withdrawn in October 2017, though it remains available on GOV.UK.
The IfRR contained a description of each dataset and metadata on the attributes in the data. This made it a helpful resource for anybody trying to discover environmental datasets that the EA had cleared for re-use by the public.
EA also maintained an unpublished "Approval for Access" (AfA) Register for the internal use of staff, which provided further detail on data that had not been approved for access, and the reasons for restricting use.
This week the EA has kindly sent me with a copy of the latest version of the internal AfA Register, from September 2015.
I've also created a PDF copy (59 MB) of the Word document provided by the EA. The information has been released under the Open Government Licence. The EA has made some redactions to remove staff names.
In its FOI response the EA says it no longer maintains the AfA Register, and does not hold equivalent information in another form. EA staff now use www.data.gov.uk to identify datasets approved for release.
Much of the information in the September 2015 version of the AfA Register remains useful because most of the datasets it describes are still held or maintained by the EA.
However this version is no longer comprehensive. The highest AfA number listed is AfA464 – Directional Waverider Buoy Data, and numbers have been allocated more recently up to at least AfA480 – Modelled fluvial flood depth difference dataset (2004).
The EA currently records more than 1,500 datasets in the Data.gov.uk metadata catalogue. Those records are searchable, but difficult to extract into a portable format now that GDS has stopped publishing data dumps of the DGU catalogue. An alternative source, the Defra Data Services Platform, currently provides only rudimentary metadata.
For a number of years the EA has also published a National Dataset List. The most recent version lists more than 3,900 datasets, though some of those are third-party datasets that the EA holds for internal use.
However that resource is also no longer updated. The EA says: "As of February 2019 this dataset is no longer being updated for publication and as such does not reflect the current situation. The data accessible from the link should be treated as an archive dataset and will remain static."
It seems to me that metadata about information assets held by the Environment Agency is no longer as discoverable as it used to be, or should be.
Elsewhere in government, the Geospatial Commission has recently encouraged its six partner bodies to publish "data discoverability" catalogues. Perhaps the GC's introduction of a standard schema will encourage the EA and other public authorities to take a fresh look at the need for inventories of both published and unpublished public data.