U.S. City Open Data Census
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Please read the Review Guidance before proceeding.
This section is not scored, but could provide valuable insights.
Answer “Yes” if the data are collected by government, or a third party officially representing government. This may be the case for state-owned-enterprises or contractors delivering public services for government.
Please also submit evidence that data is collected, managed or mandated by government (e.g. by submitting the URL to a disclaimer of government endorsement).
Answer “Yes”, if the data are made available by the government on a public website. Answer “No” if the data are NOT available online or are available online only after registering, requesting the data from a civil servant via email, completing a contact form or another similar administrative process.
How to describe the data source: If you find data on a financial department website, please fill in: “Website of National Department of Finances”. If you found it in an API of the same department, fill in: "API of National Department of Finances".
Example: I googled for the data and found the data in the first search result; I did in-depth search on single websites; etc.
If you cannot find all data characteristics online, continue answering all further questions referring to the characteristics you found.
Answer “Yes”, if you can download all data at once from the URL at which you found them. In case that downloadable data files are very large, their downloads may also be organised by month or year or broken down into subfiles. Answer “No” if if you have to do many manual steps to download the data, or if you can only retrieve very few parts of a large dataset at a time (for instance through a search interface).
Please base your answer on the date at which you answer this question. Answer “No” if you cannot determine a date, or if the data are outdated.
This question measures if anyone is legally allowed to use, modify and redistribute data for any purpose. Only then data is considered truly "open" (see Open Definition). Answer “Yes” if the data are openly licensed. The Open Definition provides a list of conformant licenses. Answer also “Yes” if there is no open license, but a statement that the dataset is in “public domain.” To count as public domain the dataset must not be protected by copyright, patents or similar restrictions, and there can be no restrictions on commercial use. If you are not sure whether an open license or public domain disclaimer is compliant with the Open Definition 2.1, seek feedback on the Open Data Index discussion forum.
Public domain statements can be disclaimers, terms of use or similar texts.
Tell us the file formats of the data. We automatically compare them against a list of file formats that are considered machine-readable and open. A file format is called machine-readable if your computer can process, access, and modify single elements in a data file. The Index considers formats to be “open” if they can be fully processed with at least one free and open-source software tool. The source code of these format does not have to be open. Potentially these formats allow more people to use the data, because people do not need to buy specific software to open it.
Data may be in a machine-readable format like an .xls spreadsheet. But they might contain unstructured information (like notes randomly written in a column). Such data often has to be cleaned to become usable. Tell us the effort it takes for you to use the data. Base your assessment on whether the data are fit for your use cases.