Bulgaria releases first open data sets

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that Bulgaria has just published the first datasets on its open data portal. Some 36 datasets from 26 public sector organisations have now been made available online.

Furthermore, the Bulgarian Council of Ministers has also established a dedicated team to overcome public sector resistance to releasing public sector data as open data and help them to extract and cleanse the data from the databases. The ambition is to publish another 100 datasets before the end of 2015.

Some of the public agencies that have provided datasets for the portal are:

• Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre* (AGCC), part of the Ministry of Regional Development & Public Works;
• Bulgarian National Metrology Institute;
• the Bulgarian Post Office;
• the State Agency for Bulgarians Abroad;
• the Executive Environment Agency (EEA), part of the Ministry of Environment & Water;
• the Ministry of Economy;
• the Council of Ministers;
• the Bulgarian National Statistical Institute; and
• the National Revenue Agency, part of the Ministry of Finance.



The establishing of the Bulgarian open data portal was announced in September 2014. It was originally launched by the Obshtestvo.bg Foundation. The portal is built on the popular CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network) open data platform, which is available as open source software under the Affero GPL licence.

* = The Cadastre is the equivalent of the Land Registry in the UK.