After Washington DC’s pioneering site, and the launch last year of London’s Data Store, a catalogue of free and open public data about the city, Paris has now unveiled a similar own open data site: ParisData. They have a Twitter account too.
There’s not a huge number of datasets listed on the site yet, but it looks very promising. My hope is that the live-running data for the huge “Velib” bike share system in the city gets added to the site, so that I would be allowed to re-enable my live bike share map of Paris.
Incidentally, the London’s bike share (aka Barclays Cycle Hire) live-running data is not in fact available on the London Data Store either – they seem not be aware of this anomaly but the operator in London has at least tacitly allowed third-party use through “scraping”. Paris is the “grand daddy” of all bike share schemes though (at least in Europe) so having Paris in the fold would be great.
For now though, for open data in France, Rennes is still the best.