Programmatic access of data quality metrics and submit.planning.data.gov.uk statuses

[jessicamcinchak]

Hi ! As a longtime consumer of Planning Data, we (the PlanX team) are excited about the work happening on the "Submit & update your planning data" subdomain around measuring the health of an organisations published datasets and would like to query (and even possibly contribute to!) some of these metrics via API.

Here's two examples:

1. GET

• User story: As a council building digital services on PlanX, I want to understand if my Planning Data integration is healthy, so that I can feel confident that applicants are going to be presented with accurate information about constraints that apply to their application.

• Context: PlanX is a platform for building digital services. Specifically, these digital services query publicly available data like planning constraints whenever possible to prevent the number of questions & external research prompts that need to be put to applicants.

  As planners build and test their services overtime, they often spot inconsistencies or inaccuracies in their own data but don't always understand how or where to troubleshoot these issues. We want to raise their awareness of their Planning Data "organisation" submission pages. Currently we provide a simple link to this page - eg this external link points to https://submit.planning.data.gov.uk/organisations/local-authority:SWK
  

• Idea: Within the PlanX editor, we could show additional "Needs attention"-type notification badges directly on this external link if we could query some of the top-level quality statistics like "number of datasets submitted", "number of errors", "needs fixing" etc. Beyond this organisation-level menu, we'd also be excited to access dataset-level quality metrics within a given organisation which we could display when editors are selecting which constraints they'd like their service to check (and help discourage them from going "live" before a given dataset is healthy)

2. POST

• User story:: As a council, I'd like to review feedback about planning data in one central place, so that I can triage issues and update my data sources.
• Context: When presenting planning constraints to applicants, PlanX presents an option to contest this data and report an inaccuracy. We've been collecting valuable feedback here, but haven't quite successfully closed the communication loop with council data providers:
  
• Idea: Rather than present this feedback directly to editors in PlanX, who are often planners, we'd like to feed it directly into Planning Data's quality feeds so that it can be made visible more widely, especially to GIS staff who are most likely to maintain these layers but do not use the PlanX editor. We can imagine a future where this issue_type codelist could possibly include an "informational" value like "User feedback". The request body might include: the specific PD entity ID of the inaccurate record, a freetext "reason", timestamp when it was received, and PlanX "source" service name. We would not intend to include any personally identifiable information about the applicant.

Thanks for considering !