Data sources
The Service currently covers the neighbourhoods of 18 cities: Warszawa, Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk, Łódź, Szczecin, Bydgoszcz, Lublin, Białystok, Katowice, Gdynia, Częstochowa, Rzeszów, Olsztyn, Gliwice, Zabrze, Bytom. The source datasets are national, but scores are calculated only for the neighbourhoods of those cities. Every score in the Service is built from publicly available data. Below we list each dataset, the licence we use it under, how often it is refreshed and — just as importantly — what that dataset does NOT tell you. How the data becomes a score is described separately on the Methodology page.
Source list
| Feeds | Dataset and publisher | Licence | Refresh | Limitations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Education | Register of Schools and Educational Institutions (RSPO), Ministry of National Education — school locations; Central Examination Board (CKE) — eighth-grader exam results. | Polish public sector information (re-use regime) | Annually, after exam results are published | The score uses mean eighth-grader exam results of primary schools assigned to the neighbourhood. It does not account for catchment rules, private schools without published results, or the quality of secondary education. Exam results also reflect pupil intake, not only what the school adds. |
| Air quality | European Environment Agency (EEA) — interpolated air quality maps: annual mean PM2.5 on a 1 × 1 km grid, combining station measurements, chemical transport model output and supplementary data. | CC BY 4.0 | Annual. The EEA publishes validated data roughly two years in arrears, so the freshest trustworthy year is not last year. | We score the annual mean — the measure health standards are written against, but one that by definition hides winter smog peaks and individual bad days. A neighbourhood’s value comes from an interpolation model on a kilometre grid, not a measurement at a specific address: it does not separate a busy road from a courtyard a few hundred metres away, nor capture a single coal stove. The score previously rested on the current reading of the nearest GIOŚ station; we retired that approach because a live reading describes that day’s weather rather than a property of the place, and Poland has too few stations to tell the districts of one city apart. |
| Property prices | Property Price Register (RCN), Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography — transaction prices from notarial deeds. | Polish public sector information (re-use regime) | Monthly (we refresh from the register every month) | These are prices of ACTUAL transactions, not asking prices — they are often lower than listings. The neighbourhood score uses that neighbourhood’s median; the price comparison in the report uses the municipality median. Neither is a per-street median, and neither reflects finish, floor or condition. Neighbourhoods with fewer than five transactions in the last 24 months are left without a score rather than given a median resting on a handful of flats. |
| Services & infrastructure | OpenStreetMap — points of service: shops, clinics, pharmacies, public transport stops, playgrounds, recreational facilities. Reach is measured around residential addresses from the national address register (PRG, GUGiK). | Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0 | OSM community updates, processed on a cycle | The score answers "how many services are within an 800 m walk of a typical address in this district", not "how many points fit inside its boundary" — so empty land does not drag a district down and sheer size does not lift it. An address is a building, not a headcount, so a tower block and a house weigh the same. OpenStreetMap is community-built, so completeness varies between neighbourhoods — a less-mapped area can look worse served than it is. Presence is counted, not quality, size or opening hours. |
| Green & nature | OpenStreetMap — green and blue land cover (parks, gardens, forests, meadows, allotments, water bodies, beaches); General Directorate for Environmental Protection (GDOŚ) — Central Register of Forms of Nature Protection (national parks, reserves, landscape parks, Natura 2000, ecological sites). | ODbL 1.0 (OpenStreetMap) and CC BY 4.0 / public sector information (GDOŚ) | OSM updates processed on a cycle; the GDOŚ register pulled periodically | We measure the share of a neighbourhood’s area covered by greenery and water — not how well it is maintained, whether it is accessible, or how far it is on foot from a given address. A large fenced-off area counts the same as an open park. The coverage also includes protected-landscape areas from the GDOŚ register, which can be extensive and may take in built-up land. |
| Noise | European Environment Agency — strategic noise maps (the Lden indicator — a day-evening-night averaged noise level, weighted against evening and night noise), compiled from data reported by Poland. | CC BY 4.0 | Per the strategic noise-mapping reporting cycle | Strategic maps are a MODEL, not a measurement at every point, and cover mainly large noise sources — roads, railways, airports, industry. They do not cover neighbour noise, bars or construction work. For neighbourhoods outside the model we report “no data”, not quiet. |
| Road travel — emergency services (report) | The State Emergency Medical Services register (RPRM) — the list of hospital emergency departments (SOR) from rprm.ezdrowie.gov.pl, geocoded onto PRG address points — plus police stations from OpenStreetMap (filtered of municipal guards, railway guards and non-station objects); drive times computed over the OpenStreetMap road network, toward the facility for SOR and from the unit to the address for police and ambulance teams. Ambulance team bases (miejsca stacjonowania) come from the voivodeship PRM system plans, and for eight cities whose plan we cannot reach (Poznań, Lublin, Białystok, Katowice, Gliwice, Zabrze, Bytom, Częstochowa) from the RPWDL register of healthcare providers, narrowed to PRM system operators. Each base states which of the two it came from: a register says a team is REGISTERED at an address, not that it is staffed and dispatched from there. | CC BY 4.0 (RPRM) + Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0 (OpenStreetMap) + RPWDL re-use terms | Register export at every travel-time recompute; the as-of date is in the report | The time is a model estimate of driving YOURSELF at free-flow speeds — rush hour takes longer. It is not the statutory response-time metric of emergency medical teams: that stopwatch starts when the dispatcher takes the call, and the team departs from wherever it happens to be. For emergency departments the law sets no travel-time limit at all. We show the facility fastest to reach by road — not necessarily the closest in a straight line. The register state is frozen on the day the report is generated; a ward can later be reorganised or closed. |
| Neighbourhood boundaries and base map | OpenStreetMap — administrative boundaries of auxiliary units, and the base map (Positron style) generated from OSM data. | Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0 | OSM community updates, processed on a cycle | How a city is divided varies: in some cities these are administrative districts, in others estates. We only ever compare neighbourhoods within one city, so a difference in granularity between cities does not distort the ranking. |
| Address search | Państwowy Rejestr Granic (PRG) — address points from the Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography (GUGiK), obtained from opendata.geoportal.gov.pl. Nationwide: 8.6 million addresses across 68,000 localities. | Polish public sector information (re-use regime) | Imported on demand after the register publishes a new edition | Addresses created after the last import may not be found. In that case a point can be placed on the map manually. Identically named streets in different localities are ordered by how many addresses the locality has — the larger town ranks higher, but only where the address actually exists there. |
Required attribution
- © OpenStreetMap contributors — data available under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0, openstreetmap.org/copyright.
- Data: General Directorate for Environmental Protection (GDOŚ) — Central Register of Forms of Nature Protection.
- Data: European Environment Agency — interpolated air quality maps (CC BY 4.0).
- Data: Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography (GUGiK) — Property Price Register and the State Register of Borders (address points).
- Data: Ministry of National Education (RSPO) and the Central Examination Board (CKE).
- Data: European Environment Agency — strategic noise maps (CC BY 4.0).
Spotted an error in the data?
We do not publish the source data and cannot correct it at source. If the error is in OpenStreetMap you can fix it yourself — the correction reaches us at the next processing run. If the error is in how we turned the data into a score, please tell us: that one is ours, and we fix it.