The Failing Omani Open Data Initiatives - Muscat Daily

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-05-02

Summary:

"The Government of Oman has considered, for many years now, opening up its data to the public in an attempt to make government services more efficient, to empower civil society, and to create business opportunities. Government data can be useful in making better decisions, can help hold government officials accountable, and can be used by the private sector to create smarts apps or deliver better services.

The first major attempt the government made for utilising open data was by the Information Technology Authority (ITA) in 2013. The ITA ran a series of events to raise awareness about the benefits of open data, launched an open data section on Oman.om, and started a competition to encourage people to use this data. This initiative was a failure, the open data section that is still prominently displayed on the homepage of Oman.om does not appear to have been updated since 2013. This page has a random list of documents without proper descriptions or any dates. Some ‘data’ files are also only available in PDF or Word Document format without a version that could actually be processed by any useful application. The ITA’s portal also does not make any consideration for the legal aspects of open data and does not provide any licence that permits developers to use this data.

The second major government attempt at an open data initiative was by the National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI), which launched in 2015 the official government data portal Data.gov.om. From a legal competence point of view, the NCSI is the body responsible for government data, not the ITA. Unlike the ITA’s single-page initiative, NCSI’s data portal is a full-fledged platform for viewing and downloading datasets. The portal offered data in actual open formats, permitted bulk download, and had a one line legal statement that said the data is open and could be used by anyone. However, this initiative was clearly a one-time effort as the data on the portal was outdated from the outset and does not appear to have been updated since its launch in 2015. The website that remains online has no real value or useful information and is extremely slow and complicated to use."

Link:

http://www.muscatdaily.com/Archive/Stories-Files/The-Failing-Omani-Open-Data-Initiatives-50ed

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.data

Date tagged:

05/02/2017, 22:49

Date published:

05/02/2017, 18:49