Open Data Board: Terrabytes of the Ministry of Culture, higher in the G8 rating and where the Ministry of Economic Development is going

October 21 turned out to be a day rich in social events , I wrote earlier about one of them, a meeting of the public council at Rosstat . But about the Council on open data it is quite possible to talk in more detail.

Before I retell everything in my own words - look at the official news there, some of the questions are open, and some I will tell now.

So, there were 3 big topics:
1. Open data of the Ministry of Culture
2. Russia's compliance with the requirements of the G8 charter
3. Technical requirements for the open data portal from the Ministry of Economic Development of Russia

Open data of the Ministry of Culture

Mikhail Gorodilov spoke from the Ministry of Culture and, in short, his speech can be reduced to the following points:

1. “We are open” They just started to open open data data and something has already been posted on the website of the Ministry of Culture - mkrf.ru/opendata/
2. “Digital content is also data” They promise a lot of digital content data and the fact that they plan to digitize and create up to 280 terabytes per year
3. “We want money” This sounded completely unambiguous that the Ministry of Culture wants the work on creating open data by them, including from digital content, to be financed from the state program “Information Society”.
4. “We want the business to pay.” The message is also very simple. So that a business that would potentially use their data would further participate in financing their creation. Transparently hinted at Yandex and Google and other large Internet holdings

These simple thoughts came from the Ministry of Culture. Moreover, they, in fact, have a lot of data that it is high time to open, but so far they have not posted any of them. Neither the state register of films, nor the database on cultural heritage, nor much more. The position is the same as that of Rosstat, but there is still less understanding.

Will they be given money? I do not know. This year, the Ministry of Finance cuts off funding for everyone and does not give money for new initiatives. Do I need to squeeze them to open what is already there? I think that is necessary.

Charter G8

At the last meeting of the G8 leaders, they signed a charter of open data (in Russian on the Kremlin website ) declaring the readiness of the governments of these countries to publish a significant amount of data as open data and the fact that generally open data becomes a priority in the openness of government.

But it is not enough to sign a charter; it is also necessary to bring the data into line with it. Now there are several international and public ratings by which this openness will be measured. Moreover, the charter contains many key and important provisions - open licenses, openness of default data and main priorities in what data should be open.

The responsibility for implementing the Open Data Charter has now fallen to the Open Data Council, and therefore priority steps and a roadmap for implementation have been discussed.

In short, everything is simple. Russia has assumed international obligations and will open up for the key arrays listed in the Charter.
In particular, steps are planned in the following areas:

• publication of open election data (CEC)
• publication of open environmental monitoring data
• publication of open data of the public part of the register
• adaptation of open licenses

and much more. Not all of this will be simple, that's for sure.

Ministry of Economic Development and a single portal of open data

The Ministry of Economic Development of Russia has long been born with technical requirements for an open data portal and recently announced a competition for the creation of a portal . Malkov from Minek spoke at the council, who talked about how they had a wonderful discussion with experts, how they had a good discussion of those requirements, and much more.

I could not resist and in plain text they told them that there was an extremely disapproving attitude towards their concept and those. requirements and that initially everything that happens looks too sharpened for one artist - the State Committee of Ukraine who recently won their own work on methodological recommendations despite the fact that they did not possess and do not have any competencies in this area.

Actually, I personally have no doubt that they have been working in this direction for a long time since the data.gov.ru domain is directed to their server and signed on HTTPS with their self-issued certificate. Here you can check
www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html#hostname=data.gov.ru

and see such a picture.


The story is very ugly and the fact that it will be just that became clear in July 2013. The Ministry of Economic Development did not hesitate to promote the “open data publishing tool” in the form of a form for HTML generation, put in the concept monitoring of the websites where it was unnecessary and in every possible way deflected from system elaboration and integration with existing government systems and publishing data in Linked Data formats and so on.

Unfortunately, the open data council cannot say anything to Ulyukaev or force the Ministry of Economic Development to carry out its work decently, but at least I have the opportunity to voice the situation as it is, and not how the employees of the Ministry of Economic Development will want to submit it in the future.

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This is not the last meeting of the council and I will definitely keep everyone informed of what is happening there.