Recap on the “The challenges of building a user-centred open data portal” webinar
The French Open Data Portal team joining us for a Future of Open Data Portals webinar episode
In December 2020, the EDP team were joined by Mathilde Hoang, Mario Restuccia, and Antonin Garrone from the French National Open Data Portal (data.gouv.fr) for an episode of the Future of Open Data Portals webinar series.
During the talk, the teams discussed their work at Etalab and their role in creating the data.gouv.fr portal. This portal is one of the main pillars of the French public data strategy and provides access to 35k+ datasets of over 2500 publishers, and 2400+ re uses. The infrastructure enables this access in three ways:
- Users or organisations can directly upload datasets to the portal in various formats;
- Datasets and metadata are harvested through another portal. Data and metadata are provided by a smaller portal, e.g. a regional one and are formatted in line with a given standard. Data.gouv.fr then collects these data from the source directly; and
- By making use of APIs.
Apart from enabling access, data.gouv.fr also shares documentation on how to publish data, which is specifically relevant for chief data officers, lawyers, project managers, or citizens. By adhering to standards and schemas, the quality of the data is guaranteed. More specifically, users can upload spreadsheets to the portal and the schema will ensure that each spreadsheet has the exact same structure, i.e. same columns, same range of values in the cells. This allows users to re-use datasets with ease and allows data to be shared between parties.
Interested to learn more about the French portal and Etalab? Listen to the recording on the EDP YouTube channel.
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