Kildare County Council’s Open Data Portal is live! – OGP Framework in Action!

Last year we announced the beginning of the engagement between Kildare County Council (KCC) and Derilinx. The engagement included the delivery of a Data Inventory Assessment (previously known as Data Audit) and the development of an Open Data Portal – all through the OGP Technical Services Framework for Open Data and Data Management. Now those projects are finished and KCC’s Open Data Portal is up and running at data.kildarecoco.ie.

Data Inventory Assessment (under category 1 of the Framework)

The Data Inventory Assessment was carried out between June and December 2022 and covered 14 divisions of KCC to enable them to identify and understand the following:

• The extent and variety of datasets, their format and their lifecycle management
• The ranking of datasets in terms of their importance to service delivery and the perceived gaps in useful data that might help the delivery of these objectives
• The potential for sharing datasets privately within the organisation and openly with the wider public.

KCC identified 262 datasets in total, of which 96 are classified as open data. Some of the key findings of the assessments are that the Arts department’s datasets are the most demanded, and that most departments already publish between 30% and 50% of their data assets.

Open Data Portal (under category 2 of the Framework)

Earlier this year we developed KCC’s Open Data Portal (data.kildarecoco.ie). This portal is built on datAdore, Derilinx Data Sharing Platform, and it can be used both as an Open Data Portal and Data Sharing platform.

By having their own datAdore instance, KCC is ensured:

• Increased visibility of data sources
• Wider utilisation of data
• Consistent description of data
• Improved Data Governance
• Better compliance with regulation
• More efficient data processes

The portal was recently launched and currently holds 63 open datasets. Datasets are classified using tags, with access to the most popular ones directly from the home page.

Looking ahead 

Kildare County Council will be publishing more datasets over time in their portal.

In the short to mid-term, the Council will engage with Derilinx once again to develop a Data Strategy. Through this upcoming work, The Council aims to create a well-planned Data Strategy report that defines the scope, purpose, and data goals to be achieved as an organisation. The report will help the organisation to further assess its current data state, identify issues, and provide strategy initiatives or solutions to address these issues. This includes putting in place a series of measures to improve how data is governed, managed, and re-used in a secure, efficient, and transparent manner, for the benefit of citizens, businesses, and policymakers.

We are delighted to see more and more organisations leveraging the OGP Framework to progress on their open data journey, especially building their own data portal (internal or open) to have more control over their data, more flexibility, and to tell their own story to the users.

You can find all public projects coming from the OGP Framework here.