Less than a tenth of all government agencies reports open datasets via the Dutch government’s central open data portal data.overheid.nl. Out of 1,069 government organisations only 89 have datasets that can be found via the central government’s data portal. To identify governmental agencies, we have made the use of the OWMS standard, the official Dutch government metadata standard for government information on the internet, which is based on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
Although all ministries and provinces have signed one or more datasets, datasets from only 21 of the total of 395 municipalities, 7 of 246 regional cooperation bodies, 12 of 155 Self-Governing Bodies and 4 of the 23 water boards can be found. High Councils of State and Public Bodies have not registered any open dataset set yet.
Central Bureau of Statistics provides more than 50%
At the time of the test, 7,813 open datasets were notified on August 24 via data.overheid.nl, of which slightly more than half (3,880) from the Central Bureau of Statistics, followed by Rijkswaterstaat (1,309). Although it appears that the Ministry of Social Affairs reports most open datasets of the ministries, only 2 of the 173 datasets it reported were copies of datasets from the Central Bureau of Statistics. If you do not count these duplicate datasets, this ministry drops the way down. The provinces of Utrecht (354) Gelderland (290), South Holland (155) and Friesland (103) logged the most provincial open datasets. Besides Rijkswaterstaat, RIVM (82), KNMI (77), RVO (52) and DUO (46) are the major suppliers.
The absence of 980 government agencies from the central open dataportal does not mean that these government organisations do not publish open datasets. There are some municipalities that have data published on their own websites or dataportals, but they have not registered these datasets or hooked their dataportal to the central one. In this way, these datasets are difficult to find.
In addition to the 89 government organisations that do report their datasets, there are 22 organisations that together have registered 261 datasets on the central government portal, but are not known as government organisations according to the OWMS standard. This includes 7 research institutes, two network operators, five archives and two administrators. However, it’s strange that the Council for the Judiciary, two implementing organisations BIJ12 and two Self-Governing Bodies, CBR and CAK do not occur in the OWMS standard. Of 39 datasets on the government open dataportal, the data owner remains unknown.
Data
The datasets on data.overheid.nl are accessible via its api data.overheid.nl. The OWMS-standard and value lists can be found at Standaardenoverheid.nl. The cleaned and combined dataset overheidsorganisaties-aanmeldingen-data-overheid-nl (CSV) can be found at data.openstate.eu.