Northern Ireland makes a splash in the 2016 Global Open Data Index survey!

Each year, Open Knowledge International, (a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting publication of government open data around the world), conducts an Open Data survey which ranks participating nations and regions around the globe, based on the availability of their key open datasets (covering a range of subjects such as statistics, air & water quality, and mapping data).

For the first time, Northern Ireland has been included in this survey, and the rankings (as published on May 16th) show that NI has placed tied 8th out of the 94 nations/regions assessed, although it should be noted that some rankings may alter slightly over the survey’s final evaluation period up to the end of May. Even with (potentially) some further tweaking of the survey to be done, the published survey outcome is a hugely encouraging result for Northern Ireland, as it shows us to be performing at a similar level to countries such as Japan, Norway and the United States, all longer-established in Open Data publication.

You can take a look at the 2016 survey results at http://global.survey.okfn.org/; there you will also find some background to the survey, as well as information on survey methodology etc.

The survey’s assessment was based on a large amount of data available on OpenDataNI, so we are, of course, pleased that Northern Ireland has scored so well, but that’s not to say that we are resting on our laurels – there is a huge amount of work yet to be done in order to realise our goal of making all NI public sector data ‘open by default’. We strive to obtain release of more government data from across all of NI’s Government Departments and public bodies, and with help and guidance from you, the OpenDataNI community, we shall identify and publish more of the data that you want to see & re-use.  Next year we hope that we can improve on 8th place!

If you have an interest in getting some data that is not yet published, let us know via our ‘Suggest Data’ page (https://www.opendatani.gov.uk/datarequest , registration/login required ), and we’ll approach the data-holder(s) to see whether we can secure the data’s release for you. Meanwhile, we are working away with the NI public sector to get data released, but your contribution helps us to show which datasets might be prioritised for earliest possible release.

And your contribution need not be confined to suggesting data, ... you can also comment on datasets that have already been published, to let us know where the data could be improved, perhaps to make the data easier to re-use or maybe to extend the possible range of ways that the data could be re-used.

You can also contact us directly (at https://www.opendatani.gov.uk/contact ) with anything else that you would like to tell us.

We are also on Twitter – for all our breaking OpenDataNI news, follow @opendatani