The Open Government Licence is the United Kingdom's standard legal instrument for releasing public sector information for reuse. Administered by The National Archives, it grants a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual right to copy, adapt and commercially exploit licensed data, subject only to attribution. It is the mechanism through which UK government property, mapping and addressing data becomes reachable without a contract.
Open Government Licence
Public licence United Kingdom
A legal instrument granting rights of reuse, rather than an obligation imposed on a regulated party.
The Open Government Licence is not an obligation on a regulated party — it is a grant. That makes it unusual in this catalog, and it is precisely why it belongs here: in the sector where every other market gates property data behind a commercial contract, the United Kingdom’s answer is a licence that removes the contract entirely.
- Royalty-free and perpetual - Copy, publish, adapt, exploit commercially, and combine with other data. Attribution is effectively the only condition.
- Standardised across government - One instrument, used consistently, so a developer does not negotiate terms per dataset or per department.
- Machine-consumable by design - Because no agreement is executed, an anonymous client — including an autonomous agent — can retrieve and use the data. No other access model in the real estate study has that property.
The State of UK Real Estate APIs found this licence doing structural work. HM Land Registry publishes Price Paid Data and the UK House Price Index as SPARQL and Linked Data endpoints that answer with no key and no account; Ordnance Survey publishes the addressing and mapping layer, including UPRN, the identifier the entire British property market keys on. Ordnance Survey scores 68.5 — the highest of any organization in the four-market study — and HM Land Registry carries the highest agent-readiness at 93.3.
The comparison that makes the point: Britain has no MLS, no data dictionary, no certification programme and no mandate of any kind, and it out-publishes the United States — which has all four — by 42.8 to 31.2. The American market standardised its schema and left distribution licensed. Britain left the schema alone and made distribution free. On the evidence of this study, the licence mattered more than the standard.
A caveat worth stating plainly: OGL is not a universal solvent even within HM Land Registry. The same organization operates three tiers — an open OGL tier, a self-serve key tier where individual datasets still require a signed licence and carry fees (the National Polygon Service at £20,000/yr, Registered Leases at £5,000/yr), and a Business Gateway tier requiring mutual TLS with an issued client certificate. That is a deliberate, well-built separation of credential from entitlement, and it is the only such design in the study.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This regulation shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this regulation in the context of a real sector.
The State of Canadian Travel APIs
Canada's equivalent licence is why the only unconditionally open organization in Canadian travel is a regulator — Transport Canada serves WMS and CKAN under it with nothing to sign, while VIA Rail's GTFS feed is undercut by site terms that contradict the licence.
The State of UK Real Estate APIs
The legal instrument that makes Britain the best-published real estate market in the world — HM Land Registry and Ordnance Survey answer anonymously because of it, and the UK beats the mandated US market 42.8 to 31.2.
Implemented by these standards
A regulation is the law; a standard is the machine-readable contract that makes it real. These are the technical standards that implement this regulation, catalogued at standards.apievangelist.com.
UPRN
OS Open UPRN is published under OGL, which is why the UK's property identifier works as a shared key.
SPARQL
HM Land Registry serves Price Paid Data and the UK House Price Index as SPARQL under OGL v3.0.
