Locations of Large Raised Reservoirs in Wales also released as open data

In my previous blog post I wrote about the Environment Agency's release of reservoir locations in England following a decision from the ICO.

I've now also been given permission by Natural Resources Wales to re-use the list of locations of large raised reservoirs in Wales under the Open Government Licence.

I have geocoded the list and published data for both England and Wales in an updated open data download on my Datadaptive site, in CSV, KMZ and Shapefile formats. I've also added data for Wales to my interactive map of reservoir locations.

Unlike the Environment Agency, NRW already publishes a list of reservoir locations on the Welsh Government's Lle Geo-Portal. That version is published under a "Conditional Licence" because it contains personal data. The version released to me by NRW under the OGL has the personal data redacted.

The redacted information is details of the "undertaker", i.e. the person or organisation that uses or owns the reservoir, where they are an identifiable individual. Initially NRW wanted to remove all undertaker names from the OGL version of the list, but I successfully argued that where the undertaker is a local authority, water company, or other non-personal legal entity there is no reason to redact that information.

(I am not entirely convinced NRW needs to apply the Conditional Licence even to the full version of the list on the Lle Geo-Portal, as the Open Government Licence already excludes re-use of personal data.)

Unlike the location dataset for England, the list of reservoirs in Wales does not include attributes such as dam type, capacity, completion dates, and risk designations. I'm sure NRW holds that additional data but it would probably take an access request to unlock it.

Image credit: Penygarreg Reservoir by Tony Hisgett (CC BY 2.0)