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2018: a new age for open public data

Published on 26 April 2018
Update on 26 September 2022
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Summary

In a few years, France has become one of the three most advanced countries in the world in terms of open data (local authorities, OGP, legislative framework, etc.). Most ministries, metropolises and large cities, many departments, regions, EPCIs, but also medium-sized cities and companies... several hundred actors have published thousands of data sets, giving rise to hundreds of new uses.

185,000 unique visitors per month on data.gouv.fr

For the past two years, the audience of the national open data platform data.gouv.fr has been steadily increasing, reaching over 185,000 unique visitors in December 2017.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/WGEYb/1/

Monthly unique visitors increased 105% from June 2016 to June 2017 and 51% from December 2016 to December 2017. The platform now has more than 33,000 open datasets from over 1,200 organizations. Among the 1,200 organizations are all ministries and most of the agencies under their supervision, the National Assembly and the Senate, administrative and judicial authorities, as well as communities, representing all territorial levels.

Three communities of use, three "thematic verticals

The activity report of the General Data Administrator (GDA) highlights the emergence of multiple user communities gathered around thematic reference data, formats, tools and practices that structure the data ecosystem vertically: the "thematic verticals". The first three initiatives of this type correspond to ecosystems that are already well structured: the geographic data vertical, the business data vertical and the transportation data vertical. These "thematic verticals" now enrich the data.gouv.fr platform.

The geographic data vertical hastaken shape around geo.data.gouv.fr. This geographic data distribution platform now references more than 100,000 geographic data sets, 20,000 of which can be downloaded in open data from 118 local or national portals. In parallel, an application programming interface geo.api.gouv.fr has been deployed to allow users to use these reference data as simply as possible. More than a billion calls were made to these APIs in 2017, demonstrating the appetite of reusers for making data available in API form in addition to raw data for download. In 2017, the National Address Base geocoding API recorded more than 1 billion requests and 11.8 million unique visitors in the first ten months of the year, compared to 443 million requests and 5.5 million unique visitors in all of 2016. The Geo API, for its part, recorded nearly 200 million requests during 2017.The enterprise data vertical: followingthe opening of the INSEE directory of companies and their establishments (Sirene directory), Etalab initiated the implementation of a vertical untied to enterprise data on the model of the geographic data vertical. The enterprise API (entreprise.api.gouv.fr), was being used at the end of 2017 by about a hundred administrations to simplify administrative procedures and avoid asking for supporting documents. Over the month of December 2017, more than 1.2 million pieces of information were obtained via this API and were therefore not requested from companies again.The transport data vertical:The Ministry of Transport and the DINSIC digital services incubator agreed in the summer of 2017 to develop together, within the framework of a State startup, a platform for access to open transport data. This platform prefigures the future national access point transport.data.gouv.fr. At the end of 2017, the stations, stops and theoretical timetables of public transport in the agglomerations of Brest, Toulouse and Grenoble were integrated into the pilot.

257 local authorities committed to open public data

In January 2018, 257 local authorities published their data, which corresponds to 6.5% of the 4411 local authorities concerned by the obligation to open their data in October 2017: local authorities with at least 3500 inhabitants and 50 agents)
  • 38 communities with fewer than 3,500 inhabitants publish their data without being required to do so.
  • The opening concerns, in the first place, the metropolises and large cities and 12 of the 13 regions of metropolitan France.
  • 33.6% of the departments have taken steps to open their doors to date.
  • There are still major geographical disparities. The historical players in Brittany and Provence Alpes-Côte d'Azur are now very active in this field and are bringing many local authorities on board.
  • The observatory has identified 21,755 datasets currently present on three types of platforms: shared portals, dedicated portals and websites.
Of the 81 platforms surveyed, 41% offer data available for download only, 59% allow for consultation and 53% offer APIs providing access to metadata or even datasets directly.

Towards a one-stop shop for energy data

170 French electricity and gas distributors have set up the ORE Agency (Opérateurs de Réseaux d'Énergie) to pool the resources and digital data of network managers and meet the legal requirements of the energy transition. The ORE agency aims to consolidate the public data of distributors and to set up a one-stop shop for energy data. The datasets published on the ORE portalallow to visualize the year by year evolution (since 2011) of gas consumption in MWh and the number of delivery points, by sector (residential, tertiary, industrial, agricultural or unaffected) and by geographical grid (region and commune).

An agenda for local energy data

The Ministry of Ecological Transition organized on Tuesday, November 10 a day of mobilization dedicated to local energy data, in collaboration with the Etalab mission, GRDF, Enedis, RTE, GRTGaz, IGN, Ademe and the Amorce association. The Ministry of Ecological Transition announced three priority areas for this day:
  • The gradual implementation of a new, more comprehensive system for accessing energy data, integrated into the national data.gouv.fr platform
  • The creation of a toolkit for local authorities to help them prepare their climate-air-energy plan. GreenTech start-ups are invited to deploy, enrich or adapt it for the benefit of local authorities
  • The opening of a "lab" on energy data in the GreenTech incubators to exchange and share knowledge.

Open Government Action Plan: an ever more active opening of data

As part of the National Action Plan for Transparent and Collaborative Public Action for 2018-2020, the government has made public a series of commitments for an "ever more active opening of data with the enrichment of the public data service and in particular the identification of a new list of reference data". The action plan provides, in particular, for :
  • Develop "verticals" (sectoral data, APIs, openlabs and dedicated community management...) according to themes (e.g.: transport, energy...) in connection with the data.gouv.fr platform
  • Improve the quality of the data on data.gouv.fr and link them together (enrich the metadata)
  • Allow citizens or companies to request data openings
  • Designate a departmental data administrator within each department
  • Publish a practical guide to open public data, including a reminder of the new legal framework (Digital Republic Act, RGPD)
  • Involve data reusers in the development of future open data policies (hackathons, consultations, training, etc.)
  • Develop tools (indicators, datasciences...) to measure the impact of open public data on the economy, democratic life...
  • Work with the community to identify 2-3 high impact datasets per department
  • Enrich the "public data service" (PDS) with new databases, by animating a governance of the PDS
  • Define a schedule for opening these datasets

Announced opening of a series of data sets

The action plan also includes commitments made by several departments:
  • The Ministry of the Interior will publishthe data relating to the overall operating grant
  • The Ministry of Ecology and Solidarity and the Ministry of Territorial Cohesionare committed to creating an access point to access the hydrometric database for flood forecasting and information, to developing APIS for the APIfication databases of the RPLS (Répertoire du parc locatif social, Sitadel (building permits), Energy (local energy data), to create a national access point to transport data for multimodal information and ticketing, to facilitate the control of energy consumption and expenditure through a national data access point (including crowdsourcing of oil supply data and prices);
  • The Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs plans to publish statistical data from consular applications serving French populations abroad as well as anonymized data from the application for managing foreign student applications.
  • The Ministry of Education plans to open and publish new datasets on school education topics, to open spaces dedicated to Open Data to the academic regions on the ministerial platform, to support the operators of the National Education in opening their data
  • The Ministry of Agriculture and Food plans topublish geo-referenced data on the delimitations of controlled designations of origin and protected geographical indications, to develop a new information system on organic agriculture allowing the geo-localization of the areas cultivated organically.
  • The Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovationis committed to increasing the availability of aggregated micro-data sets on the main milestones of higher education: post-bac orientation, success and professional integration, and to opening a set of data sets on the financial situation of higher education institutions and on the built and non-built assets of higher education and research institutions.

Parliamentary data: the National Assembly's action plan

The National Assembly has already implemented a comprehensive policy of publishing many of the data in its information system:
  • Actors (MPs/Appointments/Bodies) ;
  • Parliamentary Business (Legislative Records/Debates/Amendments/Votes/Questions); Meetings ;
  • Other (Parliamentary reserve/Contributions to citizen consultations...).
These data are published on the website and in open data. In the action plan " Openness, transparency and citizen participation " that it has made public in the framework of the Open Government Partnership, the National Assembly plans to publish on the website of the National Assembly and in open data new information necessary for the knowledge and transparency of parliamentary life. "For some of this information, it is already published on the website, but not in open data (e.g., the list of deputies' staff). The evolution will then consist in publishing the information in an open format".The roadmap foresees in particular, the publication, in open data
  • The Budgetary and Financial Regulations of the Assembly The Regulations of the Pension Fund of the Members of the Assembly
  • The minutes of the meetings of the Bureau, the Conference of Presidents and the College of Quaestors
  • Telephone numbers of MPs' offices (on a voluntary basis)
  • And more specific information on the budget of the National Assembly
The Assembly, moreover, provides, subject to compliance with the requirements of the Data Protection Act, to publish :
  • the list of persons interviewed by the rapporteurs ;
  • the list of entrances of interest representatives to the Assembly;
  • the list of MPs' staff ;
  • the international activities of the Assembly (missions abroad) ;
  • the indication of a formal vote by delegation

Open Data impact: Mobilizing and building the Open Data roadmap for 2025

"Several hundred players have published thousands of data sets... However, many of us are still "hungry",observes the FING. The subject is becoming "technical" and the imagination has not evolved much. The offer has focused on numbers, forgetting about quality and creating many ephemeral uses for lack of being able to support them properly. The offer has also focused on audiences that are not very varied and volatile (geeks/technophiles), struggling to meet other audiences whose interest is not yet well known. Finally, what is the impact of open data with respect to its initial promises? Has it created, improved or even disrupted jobs and markets? Has it modernized, decompartmentalized, or made the conduct of public action more fluid? Does it really contribute to a better world and concretely how? Has it been useful in addressing our major societal challenges, and even the challenges of our species?

The FING proposes "to take a step back and reinterview the question of the impact of open data, for itself, but also through those of the public, the offer and the ecosystem".

To this end, the FING has just launched the Open Data impact program around three directions of work :

  •  A documented assessment of 8 years of open data
  • Encourage and support innovative field experiments
  • Formulate the 10 innovation tracks or the roadmap for open data in the next 10 years.

Références :

Sources

2018: a new age for open public data

In a few years, France has become one of the three most advanced countries in the world in terms of open data (local authorities, OGP, legislative framework, etc.). Most ministries, metropolises and large cities, many departments, regions, EPCIs, but also medium-sized cities and companies... several hundred actors have published thousands of data sets, giving rise to hundreds of new uses.

185,000 unique visitors per month on data.gouv.fr

For the past two years, the audience of the national open data platform data.gouv.fr has been steadily increasing, reaching over 185,000 unique visitors in December 2017.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/WGEYb/1/

Monthly unique visitors increased 105% from June 2016 to June 2017 and 51% from December 2016 to December 2017. The platform now has more than 33,000 open datasets from over 1,200 organizations. Among the 1,200 organizations are all ministries and most of the agencies under their supervision, the National Assembly and the Senate, administrative and judicial authorities, as well as communities, representing all territorial levels.

Three communities of use, three "thematic verticals

The activity report of the General Data Administrator (GDA) highlights the emergence of multiple user communities gathered around thematic reference data, formats, tools and practices that structure the data ecosystem vertically: the "thematic verticals". The first three initiatives of this type correspond to ecosystems that are already well structured: the geographic data vertical, the business data vertical and the transportation data vertical. These "thematic verticals" now enrich the data.gouv.fr platform.

The geographic data vertical hastaken shape around geo.data.gouv.fr. This geographic data distribution platform now references more than 100,000 geographic data sets, 20,000 of which can be downloaded in open data from 118 local or national portals. In parallel, an application programming interface geo.api.gouv.fr has been deployed to allow users to use these reference data as simply as possible. More than a billion calls were made to these APIs in 2017, demonstrating the appetite of reusers for making data available in API form in addition to raw data for download. In 2017, the National Address Base geocoding API recorded more than 1 billion requests and 11.8 million unique visitors in the first ten months of the year, compared to 443 million requests and 5.5 million unique visitors in all of 2016. The Geo API, for its part, recorded nearly 200 million requests during 2017.The enterprise data vertical: followingthe opening of the INSEE directory of companies and their establishments (Sirene directory), Etalab initiated the implementation of a vertical untied to enterprise data on the model of the geographic data vertical. The enterprise API (entreprise.api.gouv.fr), was being used at the end of 2017 by about a hundred administrations to simplify administrative procedures and avoid asking for supporting documents. Over the month of December 2017, more than 1.2 million pieces of information were obtained via this API and were therefore not requested from companies again.The transport data vertical:The Ministry of Transport and the DINSIC digital services incubator agreed in the summer of 2017 to develop together, within the framework of a State startup, a platform for access to open transport data. This platform prefigures the future national access point transport.data.gouv.fr. At the end of 2017, the stations, stops and theoretical timetables of public transport in the agglomerations of Brest, Toulouse and Grenoble were integrated into the pilot.

257 local authorities committed to open public data

In January 2018, 257 local authorities published their data, which corresponds to 6.5% of the 4411 local authorities concerned by the obligation to open their data in October 2017: local authorities with at least 3500 inhabitants and 50 agents)
  • 38 communities with fewer than 3,500 inhabitants publish their data without being required to do so.
  • The opening concerns, in the first place, the metropolises and large cities and 12 of the 13 regions of metropolitan France.
  • 33.6% of the departments have taken steps to open their doors to date.
  • There are still major geographical disparities. The historical players in Brittany and Provence Alpes-Côte d'Azur are now very active in this field and are bringing many local authorities on board.
  • The observatory has identified 21,755 datasets currently present on three types of platforms: shared portals, dedicated portals and websites.
Of the 81 platforms surveyed, 41% offer data available for download only, 59% allow for consultation and 53% offer APIs providing access to metadata or even datasets directly.

Towards a one-stop shop for energy data

170 French electricity and gas distributors have set up the ORE Agency (Opérateurs de Réseaux d'Énergie) to pool the resources and digital data of network managers and meet the legal requirements of the energy transition. The ORE agency aims to consolidate the public data of distributors and to set up a one-stop shop for energy data. The datasets published on the ORE portalallow to visualize the year by year evolution (since 2011) of gas consumption in MWh and the number of delivery points, by sector (residential, tertiary, industrial, agricultural or unaffected) and by geographical grid (region and commune).

An agenda for local energy data

The Ministry of Ecological Transition organized on Tuesday, November 10 a day of mobilization dedicated to local energy data, in collaboration with the Etalab mission, GRDF, Enedis, RTE, GRTGaz, IGN, Ademe and the Amorce association. The Ministry of Ecological Transition announced three priority areas for this day:
  • The gradual implementation of a new, more comprehensive system for accessing energy data, integrated into the national data.gouv.fr platform
  • The creation of a toolkit for local authorities to help them prepare their climate-air-energy plan. GreenTech start-ups are invited to deploy, enrich or adapt it for the benefit of local authorities
  • The opening of a "lab" on energy data in the GreenTech incubators to exchange and share knowledge.

Open Government Action Plan: an ever more active opening of data

As part of the National Action Plan for Transparent and Collaborative Public Action for 2018-2020, the government has made public a series of commitments for an "ever more active opening of data with the enrichment of the public data service and in particular the identification of a new list of reference data". The action plan provides, in particular, for :
  • Develop "verticals" (sectoral data, APIs, openlabs and dedicated community management...) according to themes (e.g.: transport, energy...) in connection with the data.gouv.fr platform
  • Improve the quality of the data on data.gouv.fr and link them together (enrich the metadata)
  • Allow citizens or companies to request data openings
  • Designate a departmental data administrator within each department
  • Publish a practical guide to open public data, including a reminder of the new legal framework (Digital Republic Act, RGPD)
  • Involve data reusers in the development of future open data policies (hackathons, consultations, training, etc.)
  • Develop tools (indicators, datasciences...) to measure the impact of open public data on the economy, democratic life...
  • Work with the community to identify 2-3 high impact datasets per department
  • Enrich the "public data service" (PDS) with new databases, by animating a governance of the PDS
  • Define a schedule for opening these datasets

Announced opening of a series of data sets

The action plan also includes commitments made by several departments:
  • The Ministry of the Interior will publishthe data relating to the overall operating grant
  • The Ministry of Ecology and Solidarity and the Ministry of Territorial Cohesionare committed to creating an access point to access the hydrometric database for flood forecasting and information, to developing APIS for the APIfication databases of the RPLS (Répertoire du parc locatif social, Sitadel (building permits), Energy (local energy data), to create a national access point to transport data for multimodal information and ticketing, to facilitate the control of energy consumption and expenditure through a national data access point (including crowdsourcing of oil supply data and prices);
  • The Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs plans to publish statistical data from consular applications serving French populations abroad as well as anonymized data from the application for managing foreign student applications.
  • The Ministry of Education plans to open and publish new datasets on school education topics, to open spaces dedicated to Open Data to the academic regions on the ministerial platform, to support the operators of the National Education in opening their data
  • The Ministry of Agriculture and Food plans topublish geo-referenced data on the delimitations of controlled designations of origin and protected geographical indications, to develop a new information system on organic agriculture allowing the geo-localization of the areas cultivated organically.
  • The Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovationis committed to increasing the availability of aggregated micro-data sets on the main milestones of higher education: post-bac orientation, success and professional integration, and to opening a set of data sets on the financial situation of higher education institutions and on the built and non-built assets of higher education and research institutions.

Parliamentary data: the National Assembly's action plan

The National Assembly has already implemented a comprehensive policy of publishing many of the data in its information system:
  • Actors (MPs/Appointments/Bodies) ;
  • Parliamentary Business (Legislative Records/Debates/Amendments/Votes/Questions); Meetings ;
  • Other (Parliamentary reserve/Contributions to citizen consultations...).
These data are published on the website and in open data. In the action plan " Openness, transparency and citizen participation " that it has made public in the framework of the Open Government Partnership, the National Assembly plans to publish on the website of the National Assembly and in open data new information necessary for the knowledge and transparency of parliamentary life. "For some of this information, it is already published on the website, but not in open data (e.g., the list of deputies' staff). The evolution will then consist in publishing the information in an open format".The roadmap foresees in particular, the publication, in open data
  • The Budgetary and Financial Regulations of the Assembly The Regulations of the Pension Fund of the Members of the Assembly
  • The minutes of the meetings of the Bureau, the Conference of Presidents and the College of Quaestors
  • Telephone numbers of MPs' offices (on a voluntary basis)
  • And more specific information on the budget of the National Assembly
The Assembly, moreover, provides, subject to compliance with the requirements of the Data Protection Act, to publish :
  • the list of persons interviewed by the rapporteurs ;
  • the list of entrances of interest representatives to the Assembly;
  • the list of MPs' staff ;
  • the international activities of the Assembly (missions abroad) ;
  • the indication of a formal vote by delegation

Open Data impact: Mobilizing and building the Open Data roadmap for 2025

"Several hundred players have published thousands of data sets... However, many of us are still "hungry",observes the FING. The subject is becoming "technical" and the imagination has not evolved much. The offer has focused on numbers, forgetting about quality and creating many ephemeral uses for lack of being able to support them properly. The offer has also focused on audiences that are not very varied and volatile (geeks/technophiles), struggling to meet other audiences whose interest is not yet well known. Finally, what is the impact of open data with respect to its initial promises? Has it created, improved or even disrupted jobs and markets? Has it modernized, decompartmentalized, or made the conduct of public action more fluid? Does it really contribute to a better world and concretely how? Has it been useful in addressing our major societal challenges, and even the challenges of our species?

The FING proposes "to take a step back and reinterview the question of the impact of open data, for itself, but also through those of the public, the offer and the ecosystem".

To this end, the FING has just launched the Open Data impact program around three directions of work :

  •  A documented assessment of 8 years of open data
  • Encourage and support innovative field experiments
  • Formulate the 10 innovation tracks or the roadmap for open data in the next 10 years.

Références :

Sources

Labo Société Numérique

Labo République Française Agence nationale de cohésion des territoires
2018: a new age for open public data