Best Practice: Establish Open Government Portal for data sharing

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.

Links to the Revised PSI Directive

Techniques, Platforms, Discoverability

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

• Samos Workshop: Open Data to Improve Sharing and Publication of Information between Public Administrations PDF)
• Samos Workshop: A federation tool for opendata opendata portals (PDF)
• Samos Workshop Talk: Open Government Data - Fostering Innovation (PDF)
• Krems Workshop Session: Italian National Guidelines for the Valorization of the Public Sector Information (PDF)
• Berlin Workshop Session: European Interoperability: The ISA Core Vocabularies (PDF)
• Berlin Workshop Session: The EDP: A Technical View (PDF)
• Lisbon Workshop Talk: Model-Driven Engineering for Data Harvesters
• Timisoara BarCamp Talk: The Pan European Data Portal - Early Wireframes
• Berlin Workshop Talk: The European Data Portal - Opening up Europe's Public Data
• Berlin Workshop Talk: The EDP: A Technical View
• Berlin Workshop Talk: The Role of the Portal

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