Who can use the data and how?
anyone can, it is free!
Public Domain Licenced
Please re-use the data in any way you see fit. It is released under the Public Domain Dedication and License 1.0. We make no claim of copyright over either the data we have collected ourselves, nor the hundreds of hours of collective value added by our co-curators. That said, we can accept no liability for any issues that may arise over the re-use of this data, and you are advised to make your own assessment.Attribution
We love it when you acknowledge Open Plaques and link back to us - but you are under no obligation to do so.Photo licences
We do not store photographs on our site. We connect and add context to existing resources on the web instead. We supply links to images that you could display within your own app with the appropriate attribution. Some images are 'non-commercial' and you should decide whether to display them or not.Other plaque web sites
We obtain information from local lists on the internet (council web sites, civic society pages, etc). We do not copy from other plaque collecting sites. We ask other sites to accord us the same respect.Datapulls
Datapulls are run on an ad-hoc basis. Plaque id numbers do not change, but we occasionally delete a duplicate record. Fields are fairly stable, but subject to change. You might want to design your app so that you can reload data from the next update.Tell us if you have difficulty loading or manipulating any of these datadumps. We cannot fix what we do not know.- London 'thin' geojson dump from November 2023, 1Mb
- London csv dump from November 2023, 3Mb
- London json dump from November 2023, 8.7Mb
- UK 'thin' geojson dump from November 2023, 5.6Mb
- UK csv dump from November 2023, 13.4Mb
- UK json dump from November 2023, 32.3Mb
- Complete 'thin' geojson dump from April 2018
- Complete csv dump from April 2018
- Complete json dump from April 2018
Geocoding
Geo locations are obtained either from the position data of a Creative Commons licenced image or through manual geocoding by our volunteer co-curators. We regard all of our data to be clean of copyright and 100% in the Public Domain.OpenStreetMap
There has been discussion over importing Open Plaques data into OpenStreetMap. The jury is still out on this one.API calls
You should find JSON, GEOJSON, and CSV representations of many pages if you send the appropriate Accept: headers (or add .json or .geojson to the URL). Some of the HTML pages contain microformats too. If you're interested in any specific data, or a specific format, please let us know.The live API has a default limit of 500 records, so that our servers can cope. An area can be queried with a bounding box, such as Newcastle district by specifying the top-left and bottom-right corners of a box.Be gentle with us, don't crawl our entire site, we run all this on a shoestring budget and you might crash our servers. We will run a new datapull for you on request.Timeline
- 2009 - We start with a list of London blue plaques donated to us by English Heritage
- 2009 - Information is obtained from local authorities via polite Freedom of Information requests (with mixed results)
- 2009 - Open Plaques is officially launched after Yahoo! OpenHack London
- 2009 - We start collecting via the Open Plaques Flickr pool and the Blue Plaques Flickr pool
- 2012 - Our community of plaque hunters locate plaques in countries all over the world
- 2013 - We appear in The Sunday Times 'Home' section
- 2014 - Aimer Media and Shire Publishing collaborate with us on a data donation from a London Blue Plaque book
- 2015 - We provide data to the Ordnance Survey for their Points of Interest product
- 2018 - We appear on the 'i' web site