Open Data Initiatives in Brazil

The Open Data movement, aimed at stimulating economic growth, making social changes, encouraging citizen participation and promoting new forms of government accountability, has been growing worldwide during the last decade. Following this trend, Open Data initiatives are progressively being used by governments particularly to increase the transparency of public resource investments and their outcomes. Information and Communication Technology tools combined with data analysis techniques can be used to make these Open Data understandable to anyone interested, machine-readable, reusable, and a source for improved decision support, innovation, accountability and efficiency. This paper analyzes some Open Data initiatives within the Brazilian Government in order to verify if they meet the requirements of the Open Data definition. The results indicated that those requirements were all almost fulfilled, but there are still challenges to be overcome, such as greater update frequency, better license-free specification, and effective availability of all data which can be open to citizens. These results can help governments to identify the gaps that need to be addressed and make Open Data initiatives more effective.