Open Data Strategy

Our vision, principles, commitment and approach for open data at Severn Trent Water.

Our vision

We will make datasets available and accessible publicly to provide visibility and demonstrable value to our customers, wider stakeholders and society. We believe our open data strategy fosters a spirit of transparency, innovation and efficiency that drives the sector forward.

We are excited to be developing our comprehensive open data strategy and delivery plan which will be published here as it progresses.

What is Open Data

Open Data is published data that anyone can access, use or share, including companies, citizens, the media, and consumers.

There is a wealth of data within Severn Trent Water and across the water sector. This data has value for the organisation collecting and holding it but there is potential to add value by making appropriate data available to others for re-use. This is called making data "open".

Open data is non-personal and non-commercially sensitive. Open data is discoverable, accessible to anyone and able to be freely used, re-used and redistributed.

Image: The Data Spectrum from the Open Data Institute

Data sharing exists on a spectrum, ranging from; closed data, which is accessible only within the organisation and includes confidential information like customer, employee or legally privileged data; to open data, which is freely available to the public. In between lies shared data, which is exchanged between two or more organisations for specific purposes but is not widely accessible in its raw form. This strategy focuses on open data.

As part of open data publications, we will not share any personal or customer data such as names, addresses or other personal details.

Open data promotes transparency and accountability, whilst fostering innovation creating new products, services and collaborations as well as driving environmental, societal and economic benefits.

We will continue to publish open data to our website. As a partner of Stream, the water sector open data initiative and platform, we also use  Stream’s services and technology to publish our open data sets, ensuring secure and reliable access to information.

We have adopted open data guiding principles (FAIROE), to ensure that we publish data that is easy to find and clearly understandable by our customers and the public, whilst maximising its value for providing transparency, supporting research and encouraging innovation.

Increased data accessibility has generated and will continue to generate substantial benefits:

We aim to drive a culture that enables trust and transparency, ownership, collaborative working and sharing best practice across the water industry.

Our open data initiatives are driven by company and industry challenges, as well as the goal of improving transparency in our reported business performance. We recognise the value of opening our data and have established processes for making data available.

We will apply data availability and quality checks that assess data for its completeness, accuracy, consistency, reliability, timeliness and validity to ensure that our data sources are monitored and fit for use. Through this we are supporting the sector’s ambition to enhance the ease of use of our data and encourage continuous improvement, better data architectures, reduce data redundancy and manage emerging security risks.

Through the water sector Stream collaboration, we have developed shared ‘Open Data Guiding Principles’ that promote a common approach to open data delivery.

We want people to get the maximum benefit from the data we share. We will:

Severn Trent will work with sector peers, customers and stakeholders to build an open and trustworthy data ecosystem.

As our open data capability matures, we will continue to make and share updates to our strategy.