Open Innovations Toolbox
Open Innovations is all about doing - this page proves just that - demonstrating just some of the tools we have designed and built that are free for all to use, share and learn from.
We love building tools and making your (and our) life easier! We've built a lot of different tools for different projects, purposes and clients and we keep building more. So we decided to put them all into a nice and easy to find tool box so we can all save a bit of time today!
On this page you can find analysis and data wrangling tools that help you quickly convert data and visualisation tools. A bit further down you can find loads of our interactive dashboards and visualisations that help lookup specific information.
Of course, this work is not finished, and we are still working on new and better tools. So, keep watching this space and get involved if you can! Get in touch if there's a tool you'd like us to develop.
Analysis & data wrangling tools
If this was a physical toolbox this would be the hammer and nails. These tools are hands-on little helpers to assist you in your analysis and data manipulation needs.
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CSVCleaner
A simple tool to clean up some common issues with CSV files including date formats and values.
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CSV to GeoJSON
A web-based tool to easily convert a CSV file (containing geography columns) into a GeoJSON file. It can also create choropleth maps based on LSOA, MSOA, WD19CD, PCON17CD, or LAD19CD.
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GeoJSON Minifier
Quickly minify (compress) a GeoJSON file to reduce file sizes and make web-mapping quicker.
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Postcodes to Latitudes and Longitudes
Add Latitude/Longitude columns to CSV files containing Postcode columns.
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Postcodes to IMD Deciles
Following #hackforimpact we created a tool to make a socio-economic equivalent to Gender Pay Gap reporting. It takes postcodes as input and creates a 10-point histogram based on the corresponding Indices of Multiple Deprivation deciles.
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Hex map builder
We like creating hex maps so we've created a tool to help you make them from your own data. You can either read in an existing HexJSON file or start creating your own hex map from a CSV file.
Visualisation Tools
From making charts to displaying hex maps we've made plenty of tools to help with your (and our) visualisation needs.
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Barchart Library
This is a simple HTML barchart library that makes use of stuQuery. Being created from simple HTML elements, it is easy to style the barcharts with CSS.
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Line Chart Library
This is our small, customisable, standalone, Javascript library for making simple SVG graphs.
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Hex map builder
We like creating hex maps so we've created a tool to help you make them from your own data. You can either read in an existing HexJSON file or start creating your own hex map from a CSV file.
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Interactive hex map library
A small Javascript library for displaying HexJSON as interactive SVG maps that can be styled via CSS.
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Data mapper
Layering datasets from Data Mill North, Calderdale Data Works, Northern Data Hub, York Open Data, Salford Data Quay, Open Street Map and more.
Exploratory Tools
If you like to have a bit of an poke around data, this is the toolkit section for you. These interactive tools help you explore detailed questions in a few complex datasets in a simple way.
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Transport accessibility in North England
This tool explores how far away you could start to reach an MSOA within different timeframes, by different modes of transport.
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Business Rates
As part of the Open Data Collaboration group we looked at business rates data from local councils. This involved agreeing a common standard to publish and making visualisations of the data across councils.
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Local Growth Funding Tracker
Collaborative Project with Joseph Rowntree Foundation to create a tool that tracks local growth funding.
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OpenAudience
OpenAudience aims to help event organisers better understand the make-up of their audiences, by using postcodes to get an idea of properties including income, age, and job type.
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Flight Emissions
Estimating flight emissions for Leeds Bradford Airport.
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Northern Powergrid DFES2020
An interactive visualisation of Northern Powergrid's potential future scenarios (DFES) updated to 2020.
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Bins of the world
Daily updating data about waste and recycling bins from Open Street Map. We provide GeoJSON extracts for each UK local authority.
Example Visualisation Tools
This toolkit compartment holds a few great examples of data visualisation tools we've built for specific topics and clients. Here you can find some different hexmaps, maps and dashboards. Of course this isn't everything and you can find more great examples on our projects page.
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Local Authority COVID-19 dashboard
Visualising COVID-19 cases by Local Authority. The initial dashboard has been archived and a replacement version was made in autumn 2020.
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Divisions hex map
Visualising House of Commons Divisions on a UK-wide constituency hex map.
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Petitions hex map
Visualising petiton data, from the UK Government and Parliament website, on a UK-wide constituency map.
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UK broadband speed explorer
Average broadband download speed (Mbit/s) visualised as part of our Ofcom data day.
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Social Housing Picker
The Social Housing Picker provides an average number of weeks to rehouse calculation by Council Ward area, based on lettings over the last 5 years to customers in the chosen categories.
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Parkulator
Our tool calculates the amount of land used for parking within a user-selected map area, and will tell you how many homes or parks could be built in the space instead.
Community Tools
This section of our toolbox contains a few examples of tools that we have built to help our community.
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Half-term support for Free School Meals
Visualising real-time crowd-sourced offers of support, from multiple Google Sheets, on a web map. By the end of the week there were over 2300 offers on the map.
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Open Tree Logger
Creating a web app to interface with Open Street Map and help add the world's trees to the map.
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West Yorkshire Allotments
An experiment to improve West Yorkshire open data sets around allotments using Open Street Map.
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Schools Energy Explorer
We have built a site to allow primary school pupils and their teachers to compare electricity usage at their school with other local schools in Leeds.
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Bus Start
Our product evaluates bus routes and suggests changes that would better connect people with jobs.
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Leeds bin dates
A web-based alternative to the Leeds Bins app. We created this as an experiment in protecting privacy - we use clever techniques to avoid sending your address to our server.