[open-government] open government data in Brazil

Fri May 13 11:26:40 UTC 2011

Hi,

this is Augusto Herrmann writing, I work for the Ministry of Planning,
Budget and Management in Brazil. I also have been translating the CKAN
software to brazilian portuguese, and
catalogued a bunch of data packages you can see at http://br.ckan.net.
I'd like to brief you here on the list about the state of open
government data in Brazil, as some of you might be interested.

In Brazil, there have been efforts at federal and state level on open
data, and interest on it is growing rapidly. Just to give you an idea,
wednesday several authorities (a Minister, our Secretary of Logistics
and IT and others) have opened the IV Consegi [1] event in support of
open data, which is the conference's main theme this year. People like
Rufus Pollock from OKFN, Nigel Shadbolt from data.gov.uk, David Eaves
the canadian open data activist, Sören Auer from DBpedia project,
Silver Oliver from the BBC, Boris Villazón Terrazas from
geo.linkeddata.es, Marco Fioretti of the european open data report and
many others have come speak at the conference. And there have been
more than 3 thousand people attending! I think all of this makes up a
very good prospect for open data in this country.

At a federal level, it stated last year. We started a project we call
"Infraestrutura Nacional de Dados Abertos" - INDA (National
Infrastructure for Open Data). We're set out define standard
procedures that federal public bodies can follow when they decide to
publish open data - such as URI minting guidelines (following the UK
Cabinet Office example), admissible open data formats, and who is
responsible for what. We are at the planning stage, and there are
public servants and employees of public companies volunteering to help
us out - it really started as what people call a grassroots movement.

This is somewhat inspired by an earlier effort called the
"Infraestutura Nacional de Dados Espaciais" - INDE (National
Infrastructure for Geospatial Data) [2], which deals exclusively with
geo data, and uses standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium, and
defines how public bodies that deal with geospatial data should do to
make it available in the internet. The main difference is that the
INDE was comissioned in a top-down manner, by a presidential decree
which set out a deadline and people responsible for getting it going,
which sped things up quite a bit. The details of the workings of INDE
are perhaps the subject for another post entirely.

Besides the INDA development project, we have also an open linked data
pilot which concerns data about the SICAF system, where prospective
suppliers must register before they can participate on procurement
processes. The kind of data to be presented includes: names, addresses
and geo position of government outpost where they may send
documentation to; names of prospective suppliers and the kinds of
goods and services they offer. It also has information on the names
and position of the 5 thousand something municipalities in Brazil.
It's been released the day before the Consegi conference, and is
available at http://api.comprasnet.gov.br/sicaf  (sorry, but
documentation [3] is in portuguese only). Data is available in RDF
(all serializations), XML, JSON and CSV format. It uses cool URIs and
http content negotiation. This is the first real open linked data we
publish, if we don't count the proof of concept we did last year with
government expenditures data [4]. That one was just a CSV spreadsheet
we exctacted from a data warehouse system, with aggregated data in
time and place of expenditure, and converted it to RDF using a python
script and the SCOVO vocabulary.

I'ts not only in federal government that there is interest on open
data. The state of São Paulo has launched an open data portal, and
people in the government of the states of Alagoas, Goiás and Minas
Gerais at least have manifested intentions with regards to open data.
The accounts tribunal of municipalities of the state of Ceará has
released an API [5] people can query about the expenses of those
municipalities.

There's also involvement from public universities, a pretty strong
advocating campaign by the local chapter of the W3C (the tangran about
which has been reported by Ivan Herman at his blog [6]). A civic
hacking activist group, Transparência Hacker [7], has also been very
active about this, adovating open data, scraping data from sites that
don't already provide them in structured formats and using what has
already been published as open data.

So, this is it so far in a nutshell. If anyone would like to share
experiences, thoughts and ideas, especially about how you stated open
data teams and standardization processes in other governments, I'd
love to hear from you.

[1] http://www.consegi.gov.br/
[2] http://www.inde.gov.br/
[3] http://api.comprasnet.gov.br/sicaf/doc/
[4] http://br.ckan.net/package/comprasnet
[5] http://api.tcm.ce.gov.br/
[6] http://ivan-herman.name/2010/10/16/open-data-as-a-tangram/
[7] http://groups.google.com/group/thackday

Best regards,
Augusto Herrmann