[open-government] Guide how to run your gov dataportal

Mon Feb 25 10:51:48 UTC 2013

Hi all,

This weekend during the Open Data Day we worked in Amsterdam on the Open
Data Census. We looked for datasets both on a national and a city level.
One conclusion was that most of it is there, and it is open (besides
government spending which is not available at all...). However, it was very
hard to find the data. The Dutch national data portal data.overheid.nl was
not a very big help to us.

The main issue here seemed to be the randomness of the datasets that are
uploaded by civil servants. For example the budgeting of the centre
district of Amsterdam can be found (about 2010..) but not the other
districts. The data is old and links are sometimes dead. Tagging is not
done well which also makes finding data very hard. For example postal codes
in the Netherlands are part of a larger dataset called BAG (basisregistraties
in het geo-domein). This dataset is only to be found when you search for
BAG, and not when querying 'postcodes'.

An other thing is that different groups use their own sites to publish
data, and not make use of the national one. This means that you have to
search about 10 different data portals to find out if the data is there,
and can still not be 100% sure.

I was therefore wondering if there exists something like a 'basic guide how
to use a dataportal'. If there is not, I think a blogpost about this with
tips would do very well on the OKF main blog. What do people think? worth
doing?

Thanks, and all the best,

Joris

-- 
Joris Pekel
Community Coordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation
http://okfn.org/
http://twitter.com/jpekel
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