Open Plaques: open data about UK heritage sites

Open Plaques is a project to find and document all the UK’s blue heritage plaques, which commemorate sites where famous events occurred, or with a connection to notable historical figures.

There are currently over 1700 plaques, which can be browsed by area, by person, by role or by organisation. Though the project is currently in alpha the idea is that anyone will be able to add or edit plaques, and display photos uploaded to Flickr. We hope there will be participation from local history groups, schools and so on!

On the data plage, they state that all the data is in the public domain:

We consider the data to be Public Domain, and make no claims of copyright over either the data we’ve collected ourselves, nor the value we’ve added to existing data. That said, we can accept no liability for any issues that may arise over the re-use of this data, and you’re advised to make your own assessment. If you do re-use the data, we’d love it if you could acknowledge Open Plaques, and link back to us – however you are under no obligation to do so.

As there is a field for the plaques’ coordinates, you can view the locations of the plaques on Open Street Map in a given region, for example in Worthing, Bath or Birmingham.

See also:

• openplaques on Twitter
• the open-plaques package page on CKAN.

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