Open Data Observatory in Brazil: An Academic Initiative

With the emergence of open government initiatives in the 2000s and their formalization and dissemination in the United States in 2009, open data policies were created in several countries around the world. In Brazil, access to public data about the government, provided since the 1988 Constitution, has been promoted by milestones such as the Access to Information Law (Law No. 12.527, 2011) and the Open Data Policy (Decree No. 8.777, 2016). In addition to these milestones, necessary instruments have fostered the creation of portals and dashboards, with practices for sharing government bases and digital government. In this context, the present study was motivated by the partial results of the research project Open Data Observatory, which maps initiatives from the perspective of information organization and retrieval, focusing on the technical delineation of the Brazilian federal government’s primary sources of open, machine-processable data. Thus, the objective of the current short paper is to present the Open Data Observatory project. The research methodology involves a case study of the construction of the observatory, which included exploratory research into the instruments of the Policy and an active search in federal government agencies between June 2023 and June 2024. Partial results include the mapping of legislation, standards, and formats, as well as the identification of application programming interfaces and other machine-processable sources. In addition, a new version of the DGABr metric was published, which assesses the potential for reuse of the Brazilian government’s open government data. The observatory aims to impact how open data is consumed in Brazil, gathering technical information to effectively reuse data and supporting the dissemination of knowledge for innovation and social transformation.