The State of Open Data in Latvia: 2014

TL;DR

This paper assesses Latvia's open data landscape in 2014, highlighting that while basic data is available, most datasets lack machine-readability, bulk access, and open licensing, indicating room for improvement.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of Latvia's open data status in 2014, combining survey results with dataset overview and benchmarking against international standards.

Findings

Most datasets are not machine-readable

Bulk download options are lacking

Open license statements are absent

Abstract

This paper examines the state of Open Data in Latvia at the middle of 2014. The study is divided into two parts: (i) a survey of open data situation and (ii) an overview of available open data sets. The first part examines the general open data climate in Latvia according to the guidelines of the OKFN Open Data Index making the results comparable to those of other participants of this index. The second part examines datasets made available on the Latvia Open Data community catalogue, the only open data catalogue available in Latvia at the moment. We conclude that Latvia public sector open data mostly fulfil the basic criteria (e.g., data is available) of the Open Data Index but fail on more advanced criteria: the majority of data considered in the study are not published in machine-readable form, are not available for bulk download and none of the data sources have open license statements.