European Data Portal (EDP) organises an annual Landscaping Insight -questionnaire about open data’s state in cooperation with the European Commission. The questionnaire is directed at EU member states and EEA and EFTA countries. The questionnaire consists of 170 detailed questions and the answers have to be validated with public sources. Based on the answers, EDP analyses the opening of data, open data portal’s functionality, social impact of open data and open data policies in different countries. The questionnaire is a self-assessment so the results cannot be directly used to tell which country is the best or worst. We take into account EDP’s requirements as well as our users’ wishes in developing opendata.fi.
The Landscaping Insight -questionnaire assesses four different dimensions of open data’s state: open data policy (light blue); open data portal’s features, usage, and administration (dark blue); open data impact from a political, social, economical and environmental point of view (orange) as well as open data quality (yellow). This year the questionnaire had a special focus on interoperability between data models, open data strategies and data that has social, economical or environmental impact.
Finland’s ranking
The image above shows Finland’s open data portal’s (opendata.fi) ranking in the last five years. The dotted line displays the average score of the countries that answered the questionnaire each year. In 2018, EDP added two new categories: impact (orange) and quality (yellow). Finland has increased their scores significantly in these categories since last year.
In 2019, Finland achieved a lot. Investing in the development of opendata.fi was a good idea as Finland’s ranking improved significantly:
In the 2019 ranking, Finland belongs to a group called Fast trackers. The gap between leaders (Trend setters & Fast trackers) and followers (Followers & Beginners) grew this year and thus there are now 8 Fast trackers when there were 16 last year.
Some of the achievements that affected our ranking this year were:
- Attending multiple EDP-workshops
- Improving the usability of data and making maintaining data easier
- Making finding data easier with usability improvements and new features
- Making opendata.fi interoperable with DCAT-AP 1.2, which makes finding data easier and enables international use of our datasets
- Our content creators have been working hard on a new guide and will start publishing it in Finnish early this year. The English translations will also be available in 2020
What next?
Opendata.fi will naturally continue improving in the following year. The questionnaire gave us good ideas and suggestions for areas to improve. Of course our goal is to improve our ranking in next year’s assessment while making the service even better.
Policy
Open data policy was not Finland’s strong suit this year — Finland’s average score was slightly lower than the EU average. We ranked 19th in policy, which was significantly lower than other sections. However, the decisions that would improve our score in open data policy are largely out of the hands of opendata.fi administration.
In the following year, we aim to focus on measuring the benefits of open data as well as the use of open data in companies. Additionally, we will try to improve open data’s coverage in Finland by contacting municipalities and guiding them in opening data.
Portal
Finland ranked 8th in the section assessing open data portal’s features, usage, and administration. We did well in this section and can pat ourselves on the back. However, we won’t stop here — we will continue developing and improving the service in the following year, for example by making APIs, dynamic data and high value data more visible and accessible in our service. We will also publish the Finnish user guide for using, maintaining, and opening data early this year, and offer help in improving the quality of data. The English guide will be available by the end of the year.
Impact
Finland’s ranking in open data impact increased significantly from the previous year and we were 5th in 2019. Open data impact is assessed from political, social, economic and environmental points of view. Finland, like other member states, scored highest in environmental and political impact. In economic impact Finland scored a bit lower than the EU average, which is why this year we will focus on understanding open data’s economic benefits on both public and private sectors. Additionally, we will encourage data owners to focus on opening economically beneficial data and demonstrate open data benefits more widely by adding more showcases to our showcase gallery.
Quality
Finland also ranked 5th in the section assessing open data quality. The quality of open data along with our open data portal were Finland’s strengths this year. In the future, we plan on harvesting more and more data instead of encouraging people to add their datasets manually. In addition, we will continue working on developing our datasets and metadata and improving interoperability with DCAT-AP.
Summary
Finland scored pretty high in the 2019 EDP Landscaping Insight -questionnaire, and we will continue improving our service according to EDP’s recommendations in 2020. The image below shows what the new decade is bringing for open data in Finland and opendata.fi-service.
You can, as always, follow us on Twitter @avoindatafi. We notify our followers there about any new features and improvements we have made to opendata.fi. If you have any suggestions for improvement or wish to send us feedback about our service, you can do so with the contact form. You can also read more about Finland’s ranking in the questionnaire here.