Open Government Data Portals Analysis: The Brazilian Case

Governments and public agencies are publishing data on the Web, called Open Government Data (OGD), without restrictions for its sharing and reuse. This growing interest has motivated Brazilian Government Administrations to launch Open Data initiatives. As a consequence, in the last years, several Brazilian Open Data portals have been launched. Nowadays, there is a huge number of OGD portals from different countries and a lot of effort has been made to evaluate them. Although Brazil is one of the leaders of the Open Data initiative in South American and one of the founders of the Open Government Partnership, there are no comprehensive reports about the current Brazilian OGD scenario. In this context, we evaluated 13 Brazilian OGD portals according to several criteria ranging from the volume of data available to the quality of the data. As part of the results, we found that quantity and size of datasets are very diverse, CSV is the most used data format, at least 47 different data formats have been used to publish Open Data and most of the Brazilian Open Data portals use the CKAN platform. In this paper, we present and discuss the research method and the results of our work.