Lithuania is launching an open source-powered open data portal

Lithuania open source-powered open data portal

Lithuania is preparing a new open data portal, thanks to which businesses, citizens and public administrations will be able to access and contribute to a repository of open datasets. The Lithuanian administration chose the open source solution CKAN in order to develop its open data portal. A beta version of the portal is already operational, and it will be fully functional in June 2020.

Lithuania’s open data portal which will be fully functional by June 2020 involved several administrations of the Lithuanian Government. The portal is been developed by the Information Society Development Committee in partnership with the National Paying Agency, the National Education Agency, the Agricultural Information and Rural Business Centre and the Employment Service and National Labour Inspectorate.

The portal aims to enable public sector and businesses to create a catalogue of their own open datasets, plan open data production of datasets, use the data transformation tools provided on the portal and create open datasets for publication and reuse. The current beta version of the portal presents open data from five public sector institutions and already gathers 92 datasets in machine-readable format. According to Mr. Julius Belickas, from the Information Society Development Committee, the current beta version of the portal presents open data from five public sector institutions and already gathers 92 datasets in machine-readable format. Soon, the data.gov.lt portal will integrate datasets published in local governments’ portals.

Open data users of the portal will be able to easily find the right datasets, comment on additions or revisions to datasets already published, record the need for new open datasets, share innovative data application and analysis solutions, as well as have access to real-time and frequently updated sets of data.

So far, the already available open datasets from five institutions cover the following areas:

Environment;
Economy and Finance;
Energy;
Culture;
Science and Technology;
Regions and cities;
Social security;
Health;
International relations;
Law enforcement;
Transports and communications;
Public administration;
Education; and
Economic activity and business.
An open source-powered platform

In order to develop the IT infrastructure of the platform, the Lithuanian government signed a contract with the Norwegian IT company ATEA. The company used CKAN, an open source document management system for the development of data hubs and data portals. CKAN is built with Python on the backend and Javascript on the frontend. It uses PostgreSQL for its database and its search feature is powered by SOLR. It has a modular software architecture that allows extensions to be developed to provide additional features such as harvesting or data upload.

The CKAN software is available on GitHub under the Affero GNU GPL v3.0 license. The data.gov.lt portal is available under a CC BY 4.0 license, which means that users are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

The CKAN solution is well-known to public administrations around the world, as shown by the CKAN Government Working Group which gathers the US, Canadian and Australian governments. The Working Group aims to promote the use of CKAN and foster the collaboration between governments in order to develop and maintain the CKAN open source software.

Source: joinup.ec.europa.eu