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Best Practice: Establish Open Government Portal for data sharing

27 June 2016

This version
http://www.w3.org/2013/share-psi/bp/portal-20160627/
Latest version
http://www.w3.org/2013/share-psi/bp/portal/
Previous version
http://www.w3.org/2013/share-psi/bp/portal-20160407/

This is one of a set of Best Practices developed by the Share-PSI 2.0 Thematic Network.

Creative Commons Licence Share-PSI Best Practice: Establish Open Government Portal for data sharing by Share-PSI 2.0 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Outline

Data portals can facilitate the distribution of open data by providing easy-to-access, searchable hub for multiple datasets. They often also act as showcases for reuse of data and as a hub for the interested community.

Challenge

Public administrations consist of government bodies of differing sizes and often their information systems lack interoperability. Data sets are of different sizes sometimes relating to small localities only, which makes them less interesting to the broader community such as the infomediary sector. Furthermore, the datasets are in different formats which complicates their reuse.

Solution

A data portal is established by the government (national, regional or local). This may be managed in-house or by a contractor. Close collaboration with the R&D or education sector can help to meet fundamental goals at the beginning of the portal project. Researchers and computer engineering students are involved in direct re-use of data in development of innovative services (web and mobile applications).

Why is this a Best Practice?

A portal fulfils many functions:

  • it acts as a platform through which datasets are made available, catalogued and made searchable;
  • it promotes the provision of metadata and makes it easy for that metadata to be added at the time of publication;
  • it acts as a show case for applications that re-use the data;
  • it can also act as a community hub.

How do I implement this Best Practice?

Data portal software can be developed from scratch, bought off the shelf or obtained as open source software. The best known example of an open source package is CKAN.

Where has this best practice been implemented?

According to one study, there are now more than 1600 open data portals around the world.

References

Contact Info

José Luis Roda-García, Director of the Canaries´ Open Data PlatformUniversity of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.

Any matters arising from this BP, including implementation experience, lessons learnt, places where it has been implemented or guides that cite this BP can be recorded and discussed on the project's GitHub repository

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