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Belgian government relaunches open data portal

Fedict – the Belgian Federal Public Service for Information and Communication Technology – and the office of Theo Francken, the Secretary of State for Administrative Simplification relaunched the federal open data portal – http://data.gov.be/ – last Tuesday, Belgian news site Datanews reports.

Fedict launched the first version of the open data portal in Belgium in 2011. The portal was linked to some 60 data sets, including usual government statistics, but also various metrics data, technical lists and public databases, such as for example the central social security databank and the Flanders built heritage database.

The portal was relaunched last Tuesday in Brussels at an event enhanced by presentations by start-ups using open data for the products, such as data.be, which spoke about its associated lex.be site, and Ontoforce.

Screenshot of the Belgian open data portal
Screenshot of the Belgian open data portal in its Flemish disguise

“The aim was to draw attention once again to the data made available by the public sector,” Fedict director Bart Hanssens explained. “In the meantime a thousand data sets have nevertheless already been made available not only by the federal government, but also by other levels of authority.”

Some eighty people attended the open data workshops that were organised. “We are interested in knowing the outcomes of opening up all these data sources,” Hanssens added. “In this regard, we’re still at the very beginning.”