Pollutant Emissions 100% open

What data is expected?

Aggregate data about the emission of air pollutants especially those potentially harmful to human health (although it is not a requirement to include information on green house gas emissions). Aggregate means national-level or more detailed and on an annual basis or better. Standard examples of relevant pollutants would be: carbon monoxides, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter etc.

What data is available

•   Does the data exist? Yes
•   Is data in digital form? Yes
•   Publicly available? Yes
•   Is the data available for free? Yes
•   Is the data available online? Yes (Here)
•   Is the data machine readable? Yes (XLS, CSV, PDF, WMS, SQLite)
•   Available in bulk? Yes
•   Openly licensed? Yes(Here)
•   Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis? Yes

Details

PortalU is a central portal for environment data including sources at the national and the federal state level. The portal aggregates metadata and links to decentralized datasets and services: http://www.portalu.de - however, the cooperation between the federal states and national government has been terminated, PortalU will go offline on December 31, 2014.

Data on air and water pollution can be found at the the German version of the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register, http://www.thru.de. It allows searching for a specific site, company or field of industry (http://www.thru.de/search/?no_cache=1) as well as downloading the entire database in bulk (http://www.thru.de/fileadmin/SITE_MASTER/content/Dokumente/Downloads/PRTR-Bundle_Herbst-2014_rev1.zip). Searches can be stored as PDF or Excel files, map features can be obtained via WMS. The database is updated twice per year, every April and October. The database covers 2012 as the most recent year, which is due to the rather complicated European reporting system. The most recent update was in October 2014.

The terms and conditions are a bit unclear, as they mainly refer to general use of the site (http://www.thru.de/nutzungsbedingungen/). The terms also state that any use of the data is okay as long as the source is attributed and content is not altered or manipulated. I would interpret this as: "You shall not change values in the database, but everything else is alright", especially because thru.de has an own article on its site claiming they are open data (http://www.thru.de/thrude/auswertung/top-thema/thrude-ist-open-data/).