UK Government Open Data Metadata Catalog, Updated Nightly

A nightly updated catalog of metadata for all datasets available through the UK government's data.gov.uk service. The dataset is published by the Government Digital Service and includes details on datasets, resources, organizations, and quality assessments. It is available in CSV and JSONL formats, with a license of OGL-UK-3.0.

Use Cases

• Build a dataset search engine based on the metadata fields for organization, title, and description.
• Analyze trends in data publication and quality over time based on the archival and QA results included.
• Monitor the health and openness of linked resources using the included stars of openness and broken link detection.
• Create a unified inventory of UK government data assets by joining dataset and resource tables.

Strengths

• Updated nightly, providing current metadata.
• Includes enhanced validation and quality assessment fields like broken link detection and stars of openness.
• Available in JSON Lines format for efficient, memory-friendly parsing.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Government Digital Service via data.gov.uk

Collection Method

Generated using 'ckanapi dump' from the CKAN platform.

Time Range

Ongoing, with nightly snapshots.

Freshness

Nightly updates; last recorded update was 2026-07-08.

Geography

United Kingdom