Open data
Governments create and look after data that helps deliver services to the public. In Northern Ireland, the government wants to make more of it available as ‘open data’. Open data is published in an open format, is machine-readable and is published under a licence that allows for free reuse.
OpenDataNI portal
You can access the OpenDataNI portal to find data from government departments and other public sector organisations in Northern Ireland. Data is available in datasets across a range of themes:
- health
- education
- economy, industry and employment
- transport
- finance
- tourism, leisure, culture and arts
- property and land
- environment and agriculture
- population and society
- Access the OpenDataNI portal
You can use the data in all sorts of ways. This may be to look at trends over time from one policy area, or to compare how different parts of the NI public sector go about their work.
All data published on the OpenDataNI portal falls under the Open Government Licence (OGL).
The OGL allows anyone to copy, publish, distribute, send and adapt the licensed work, and to exploit it both commercially and non-commercially for free. In return, the re-user of the licensed work has to credit the source of the work and (if possible) provide a link to the OGL.
Working with open data
There are lots of different terms and technical words about the use of open data and they can be quite overwhelming. You can find useful information about open data on the EU Open Data Portal.
Open data and government
An Open Data Strategy for Northern Ireland has been created to help make government data freely available to everyone, for use without any limits. It aims to transform data management practices and create an ‘open by default’ culture within the Northern Ireland public sector.
Examples of government open data in use
Since the launch of OpenDataNI in late 2015, hundreds of Northern Ireland public sector datasets have been published. Many of these have been re-used in education, for research and to create new services for the public.
The OpenDataNI portal has a showcases page, where you can find many more interesting examples of how Northern Ireland government open data has been re-used.