About this demo
A proof of concept by Datopian showing what Lichfield District Council’s open data could look like with a faster, friendlier front door.
What this is
The council publishes 220 items on its ArcGIS Hub, LichfieldDC-Data. Almost all are files: monthly payments to suppliers and procurement card transactions, business rates lists and reliefs, councillor allowances, parking accounts, brownfield land registers, and smoke control orders. This demo takes that same public data and puts it in a site built for finding and using it: 206 tables (including one that joins every monthly payments file), 14 documents and 1 map. It is not an official council website and the council has not reviewed it.
What it adds
One search across everything
Search names, descriptions and keywords across all 221 datasets, filter by topic or type, and go straight to the data.
Every file is a table you can read
CSV and Excel files open in a sortable, filterable preview. No download, no spreadsheet software, no wrong characters.
Queries in the browser
Filter, chart or write SQL against any table, including all the monthly spending files at once. It runs in your browser, with no database to run.
How it works
The Hub’s DCAT feed lists each item. For every file, the site downloads it from the council’s ArcGIS Online account and converts it into open formats: tidy UTF-8 CSV and Parquet for tables, and map tiles, GeoParquet and GeoJSON for the one map layer. Along the way it fixes what makes the files hard to use: Windows-1252 text, title rows above the header, financial statements laid out for printing, and UK dates and “£1,050” amounts that spreadsheets read as text. Each dataset page lists what was changed and links the original file. Row counts are checked against the files. PDFs are linked, not copied.
A scheduled job can re-read the Hub to keep the site current. ArcGIS stays where the council manages its data, and each dataset page links back to it.
Questions or feedback?
This demo was built by Datopian, a core contributor to CKAN and the team behind PortalJS. Write to us at hello@datopian.com. For questions about the data itself, contact the council’s mapping and open data team at mapping@lichfielddc.gov.uk.