Mapping the world of open data portals

OpenDataSoft has mapped more than 1,600 open data portals worldwide, in an effort to make clean, usable data easier to find and access.

After collecting a comprehensive list of open data portals from around the world through the company’s Open Data Inception project and filling in geographical coordinates for more than 600 of them by hand, the data was cleaned, organized and categorized.

The datasets were then uploaded into OpenDataSoft’s cloud-based data solution software, where the team used the platform’s widget library to make the lists accessible through maps and charts, as seen on the OpenDataInception.io site. A search function was also added for easy filtering.

According to OpenDataSoft's Rémi Mercier, the process revealed that more than 200 countries have opened up data, with the United States alone delivering 500 open data portals. The free resource can be especially helpful to the civic tech community, Mercier said.

The team will continue to tackle dead URLs and new portals, and it plans to incorporate sources from data dumps and Github repositories in the future. “We hope that many more governments, nonprofits and corporations will follow suit, and we hope that we will discover additional existing portals to add to the list,” said Mercier.