Licence and attribution

Attribution under the Open Government Licence is a condition, not a courtesy. The licence says that failure to comply ends the rights granted under it, automatically. So the required statement is stored against each source and rendered from that record, rather than written once into a page template where it can drift away from what the data actually is.

Sources in use

Why attribution is per-source, not sitewide

It is tempting to put one Open Government Licence line in the footer and consider it handled. That is not sufficient for several UK products. ONS requires three different statements depending on what you used: lookups need ONS attribution alone; boundary products additionally require an Ordnance Survey acknowledgement; postcode products require Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail. A single footer discharges the first and quietly fails the other two.

We deliberately chose the Code History Database over the postcode directory partly for this reason: it is a lookup product, so it carries no Ordnance Survey, Royal Mail or Northern Ireland licensing conditions, and we can republish derived tables from it cleanly.

What we have decided not to use

Where a licence cannot be established, we do not proceed on the assumption that open data is probably open. The Innovate UK participant spreadsheets state no licence on their publication page, and the only licence term reachable from them is non-commercial — which would not permit this site. They are loaded into nothing and published nowhere while we wait for the publisher to confirm.

This site’s own content

The prose, the page structure and the derived tables are © Adapt Progress Evolve Limited. The underlying data belongs to the publishers named above and is used under their licences. Our arrangement of it is ours; their figures are theirs.

Reusing our tables

Every data page has a .csv and .json twin at the same address, without a key, without a rate limit, and with Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * so you can fetch them from a browser. Use them. If you publish anything derived from them, cite the page and the underlying publisher — the citation block on each page gives you both, formatted.