Open Plaques is an open source project (both code and data) has data on over three and a half thousand commemorative 'plaques' (often blue and round) that can be found across the UK.
New plaques are being added regularly and you browse the plaques by area, people, roles or organisations. Or see a list of all plaques.
Where available, the data for each plaque includes the:
- Inscription
- Person being commemorated
- Geo location
- Address / country
- Organisation that created the plaque (around 250 so far)
- Colour
- Roles (e.g. author, inventor, actor, prime minister, namer of clouds etc.)
- Verbs (e.g. lived, worked, died, visited, built, founded) that link the person to the location
- Link to creative commons photo of plaque on Flickr
Most of the page views on the site have .xml .json .kml views, just add the extension to the url.
Another very useful query is the 'box' query. Specify two geopoints, top-left and bottom-right and get returned all the plaques in that bounded box, e.g. http://openplaques.org/plaques.kml?box=[51.5482,-0.1617],[51.5282,-0.1217] or http://openplaques.org/plaques.json?box=[51.5482,-0.1617],[51.5282,-0.1217]
Openness
Data is in the public domain. The data page says:
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.
The photographs are under different Creative Commons licenses - including those with non-commercial restrictions.
