Open Government Data (OGD) Platform, India
Open Government Data (OGD) Platform India – data.gov.in – is a platform for supporting Open Data initiative of Government of India. The portal is intended to be used by Government of India Ministries/ Departments their organizations to publish datasets, documents, services, tools and applications collected by them for public use. It intends to increase transparency in the functioning of Government and open avenues for many more innovative uses of Government Data to give different perspective.
The objective of the policy is to provide proactive access to Government owned shareable data along with its usage information in open/machine readable format, through a wide area of network across the country, in a periodically updated manner, within the framework of various related policies, rules, and acts of the Government. Developed using Open Source Stack, the project is one of the initiatives under Pillar 6 (Information for All) of the Digital India initiative.
The Platform has a rich mechanism for citizen engagement, which could help Ministries/Departments/Organizations prioritize the release of Government Datasets. Besides, enabling citizens to express their need for specific datasets or apps, it also allows them to rate the quality of datasets, seek clarification or information from nodal officers of participating Government entities.
Salient features of OGD Platform:
Ministry/Department/State contributes/ publishes resources in open format (CSV, XLS, XML, ODS, JASON) either directly or by Web Services through workflow-based Data Management System.
Provides single window access to the datasets and apps published by different Ministries/Departments/Organizations/States of in open format.
Suggestions and requirement of data can be submitted by citizens/ community to help prioritize data sharing by participating ministries/ departments. Anyone can endorse already submitted suggestions.
People can directly write to Chief Data Officer (provider) (previously called Data Controller) seeking any further clarification/information on the released resources or related requirements.
Platform enables better discovery and usage of Government datasets through visualizations and development of apps, mashups, etc. Visualization Platform with facility to create maps as well as different chart options like radar, bar, line, area, pie, column, etc.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to Query Datasets
Direct and dynamic query to access data items of selected datasets have also been provided through the APIs.
Update alert service can be subscribed for Catalogs.
A separate Community Portal (http://community.data.gov.in) has been launched to provide a common platform for knowledge sharing through discussion and to contribute through Blogs, Infographics, Visualizations, etc. using data available on the platform.
People can create visualizations of their own data using the visualization engine service of the OGD Platform.
Custom Widgets to Share/Link/Consume filtered set of catalogs (Ministry/ Department/ Organization as well as Sectors etc.).
Platform has Responsive Web Layout design i.e. service available on multiple web/ mobile platforms.
People can rate the resources (datasets/apps) on three aspects i.e. Quality, Accessibility and Usability on the scale of 5.
Separate Event portal (https://event.data.gov.in) for management of workshops, hackathons, challenges, etc. have been created.
Software as a Service (SaaS) portal for OGD SaaS instance has also been launched for State and other organizations to create their own Open Data site.
For more information, please visit: https://data.gov.in/