Data licence

Re-use of our data

You may use data accessible through our API services and web portal, subject to the terms laid out in the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, except for any third-party data sources listed as incompatible below. If you wish to use our data under a different licence, please contact us.

You may provide attribution in any form the licence permits, but we recommend linking to www.urbanobservatory.ac.uk and crediting the 'Urban Observatory at Newcastle University'.

If you are preparing academic work using our data, you can reference using the DOI information listed in this catalogue.

Restricted data

The data available to all users through our API and portal is not restricted data.

By law, we are required to protect some of the data we hold, such as the occupancy of offices allocated to a single individual, and high resolution CCTV imagery. To access protected data, please contact us for more information. Using the data is likely to require a combination of university ethics approval, data management plans, and an audit to comply with the Data Protection Act 2018.

Third-party data

In addition to our own sensor network, we archive and provide access to data obtained from third-party sources. Additional licensing constraints or attribution may be required if you use any of the following data sources.

The licence we have adopted (CC-BY) is compatible with data released under Open Government Licence, but you should acknowledge the original source of the information.

• Met Office data is provided under Open Government Licence and compatible with our licence. You should acknowledge the source of the information as described in the Met Office DataPoint API Terms and Conditions.

• Tyne and Wear Urban Traffic Management and Control data is provided under Open Government Licence and compatible with our licence, as described in the Tyne and Wear UTMC Open Data Licence. You should acknowledge the source of the data.

• Environment Agency river levels and rain gauge data is provided under Open Government Licence and compatible with our licence. The real-time flood-monitoring API page provides an attribution statement you should use.

• DEFRA AURN network data is provided under Open Government Licence and compatible with our licence. You should use the attribution statement provided on the UK Air Data Archive pages.

• Weather Underground data is not compatible with CC-BY, and our standard licence does not apply. Additional constraints on reuse of data and its attribution apply, for which you should refer to the Weather Underground API Terms and Conditions.