Surprise uses for open org data

We’re very nearly to launch data.southampton to the public. This week I’ve had two very interesting suggestions for ways the data can be useful.

Last night, a taxi driver suggested my ‘search a map for university buildings by number‘ [link is university-network-only until March 7th] tool would be really useful for their dispatch to find our more obscure buildings.

I was also asked by one of the door staff at The Hobbit for a feed listing any large student events which might mean they need extra staff. Sadly, a bit of investigation suggests that most student events are locked up in the facebook silo and not easy to get at as data.

In other news, I read a very exciting tweet; Edinburgh had a go at publishing a ‘places’ dataset, using our OpenOrg Places recipe! It looks rather spiffy rendered on Google Maps using my GeoRDF to KML service. Although it’s rendering the addresses rather than the buildings themselves, as that’s what they’ve attached lat/long to.