Open data in Latvia

The Latvian Open data portal

Purpose of data.gov.lv is to gather and to circulate Government institution and Government organization collected data in on place for public use, as this data is valuable for the development of innovations in the state.

On this portal datasets can be browsed by category, keywords or institution.

ERDF logo

 

The portal is based on open source technologies including CKAN Open data catalogue.

Developed add-ons are available at: https://github.com/dpp-dev

The Latvian Open Data Portal was created by the European Regional Development Fund co-financed project Nr. 2.2.1.1/16/I/001 "Public Administration Information and Communication Technology Architecture Management System" (PIKTAPS)

 

 

Open Government Partnership

The Third Action Plan for Open Government Partnership of Latvia is taking an action towards openness, responsibility, publics’ participation and the use of ICT [1] 

 

This plan carries out the improvement and implementation of various services in the Internet environment. One of the 12 commitment plans of Latvia is the development of an open-source public data portal. But to fulfill the entire target of 2017-2019 OGP plan Latvia has committed to involve society in the selection of datasets. Consequently, the website has the ability to vote which data should be opened.

So far in Latvia many valuable data were not available, since collecting them is a paid service, for that reason, access to re-usable data containing metadata has been difficult. Only a few institutions, on their own initiative, published open data on their websites.

In 2013, the European Union (EU) adopted the Directive 2013/37/EU with a view to introducing uniform practices and rules in all Member States for the re-use of public administration information. In Latvia, in 2015, the relevant amendments were incorporated into the Information Disclosure Law.

According to the directive, in Latvia the data that is open should be published "on the authority of its own initiative, if it is useful ", which means the voluntary principle in the publication of data and does not promote the general" open by default "compliance with the principle.

This portal was opened within the OGP to facilitate the opening of data, of course, with respect to the protection of personal data. Involving society in choosing the datasets to be opened.

 

From this commitment, an open data portal, gains all the groups of the public:

Members of the society will not only be able to vote for data sets of interest to them, but also to obtain data without bureaucracy.

Government institutions will increase the efficiency of work and improve their image by opening and publishing their data.

Entrepreneurs will have more data available that can be used to create new products or services, thus contributing to overall economic growth.