Welsh Water and Open Data Institute collaborate on open data

Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water is working with the London-based Open Data Institute on the development of an open data strategy.

The project comes following the June publication by the regulator Ofwat of a review of open data delivery by Britain’s water companies.

There Ofwat indicated its intention to develop a licence condition obligating companies to deliver on the open data challenge and achieving a step change in open data maturity within 18 months.

In a posting, the Open Data Institute states that it will support Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water to develop and implement an open data strategy, setting out its ambition and plan for implementing open data, and becoming an open data leader in the water sector.

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In the initial stages, the focus will be on developing a shared understanding across the company of the opportunities made possible by publishing open data.

The Institute also intends to engage with a range of external stakeholders, to understand their needs as current or potential users of open data published by Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water, to inform priority actions and support the development of use cases.

For the longer term, the focus will be to develop a strong framework to embed open data enablers in line with Ofwat’s recommendations, developing the organisational culture and delivering on priority high-value use cases.

Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water anticipates harnessing the potential of open data to transform its approach to addressing long-term challenges in new ways, such as with spills analytics and drainage management.

“We see open data as being integral to solving some of the challenges we, and the entire sector, are facing,” says Kevin Parry, Chief Data Officer at Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water.

“The [open data strategy] will help us work even more closely with our customers, partners and the community, and I am looking forward to seeing how it accelerates innovative thinking and new ideas.”

The Institute reports that the company has already made significant progress in open data enablers.

Among this is the launch of the Dŵr Data Academy as an internal data literacy initiative intended to support the learning and development of data skills across the entire organisation.

The company also is developing partnerships with several Welsh universities, including participation in a data sharing consortium with Bangor University, Cardiff University and Public Health Wales to research the presence of viruses in wastewater.

Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water is also a partner in the Northumberland Water led ‘Stream’ project, which is aimed to put in place the technology and processes to facilitate open data by the sector.

Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water is Britain’s only non-profit water company and supplies drinking water to over 3 million customers in over 1.4 million homes and businesses across Wales.