Rwanda in her efforts of catching up with the fourth Industrial revolution is now, through the Ministry of ICT and Innovation, setting up another milestone, the "Rwanda Open data portal". That was one of the key recommendations from the "Data Revolution Policy" adopted a few years back.

What is an Open Data portal?

Open data portals are bridges linking Data consumers and data publishers. The digital footprints that we leave behind, from all of our different "digital walks of life" are increasingly becoming the fuel that will drive us toward this fourth industrial revolution. A lot of data has been created due to the change of mores that modern technologies has brought upon us. It would only be wise to take these opportunities brought by these unequivocal resources and use them to our advantage.

The most well-known and earliest Open Data Portals have been deployed by different levels of governments. But with the evolution of the Open Data ecosystem, Data providers become more diverse and Data assets have ever been since, no longer limited to government related data.

Open data framework is still a new model and even so to technologically advances countries. Lots of studies are currently ongoing such as the "Open Data 500" that maps organizations and companies in the US that operate under this model. However there are no standard rules of categorizing open data portals.

In this kind of a standard-less environment however, I will try to cover in this article, how the Rwandan Open Data portal should look like and the scope of what services and good out-comings I would expect from it.

Openness of Data is more of a business model than a simple technology feature. And therefore it is expected that all government institutions and agencies adopt this business model due to the business advantages that the model will come up with, and that I will thoroughly discuss all along this article.

Who Should Adopt "Open Data Portals" and How?

Government Bodies

Government and public bodies have the responsibility of increasing public access of high value, machine readable data sets by providing uniform services of, cataloging, indexing, storing, search and availability of public sector's data information, as well as, web services among other information systems to citizens. The main goal here is to launch a portal that will consolidate all sources of public information available on a single website, which in turn will be the focal point of concentration and distribution of public data. Data sets should be available with open licenses, allowing further use without restrictions and without cost.

Responsible government bodies should be responsible of ensuring the availability of thematic data sets falling under their jurisdiction in the form of open data, giving priority to those with high value and those that would benefit more to citizens and businesses. Such Data may derive from the following thematic areas: Financial Data, Commissions, Decisions of the state, Taxation, Social security contributions, Environment, Construction activities, Investments, Culture, Tourism, Education and research, Prices of products and services, Efficiency of public services, etc.

Rwanda through the Ministry of ICT and Innovation, RISA and other stakeholders has organized a web development competition so to involve technologically able Rwandans in coming up with a solution, that would make centrally available, all open data records of the country. The portal should be able to collect both manually and automatically all decentralized data catalogs of Rwanda. The collected Data, ranges from basic weather information to detailed statistical Data from all administrative levels. This model is intended to contribute to the open data landscape and thus supports the idea of linked open data, which will be structured in a way that allows the publishing of interlinked data, which happens to become even more useful for analytics.

Local Government

"Local Open Data portals" should also be encouraged since, compared with National Level Open Data portals, they offer more data on local environment with smaller granularity. The technological and cost implications of this local open data model will be discussed shortly.

Domain Specific Areas

"Domain Specific Open data portals"; focuses on Data Sets that are in one or more specific domains. For example geographical/spatial elements such as maps, road networks, and beach boundaries differ from Transportation/real time-traffic data sets in terms of visualization. Usually Domain specific data portals have higher quality data sets in those specific domains compared with "comprehensive data portals", their data sets are more structured which in return can increase re-usability of the Data. However "comprehensive data portal" aggregate all these Data sets and publishes them as machine-readable linked Data.

Private Sector

"Open Data portals in Private Sector".

Private sector and businesses are an emerging part in the open data ecosystem. However with limited interest in comparison with the popularity of Government open data.

Open data in private sector can however lead to new business models and add significant value to businesses. There are some studies about the value of open data in private sectors such as the "Deloitte report, 2012" and the "McKinsey report"(Manyika, 2013). Different from the Government open Data; Open Data in private sector's publishing platforms are highly tailored for the business models and requirements of their interests. So each business will usually develop their own platform and API according to their interests and purposes. Open data sets of this environment can range from sustainability to financial performances. The principle objectives are: Increasing transparency and involvement of all stakeholders; Improving business processes and Encouraging innovation by engaging users and developers to come up with new and better applications.

Technology Enabling Open Data portals

Depending on various open data models, some discussed above and others not, various platforms have been built to suite the Openness of Data. The Intention and the Data set or Data granularity of a given Open Data model will be the main parameters of setting and of the adoptions of a so and so platform.

Data Granularity or the size of data items chosen as unit of protection by concurrent protocol, will determine the speed and the efficiency of a given processing Unit. Granularity can range from small to large data items.

Example; the entire database, a file, a page (also called an area or database space), a section of a physical disk in which relations are stored, a record or a field value of a record. All due to their respective sizes, will have a significant effect on the designing of a concurrent algorithm. A larger unit of protection will give better advantages in terms of protection but will also take time to be processed and thus delay transactions.

Benchmarking with other well-known Open Data portals will give examples of different platforms that are in current usage.

• For Local-level Open data Portals; such as the "open data Vienna"

Compared with National level open data portals, local level portals offer more data on local environment with smaller granularity. "CKAN" is their platform of choice. However, considering the technology readiness of different regions and the cost of deployment, many local level portals also choose cloud based commercial platforms such as "Socrata" or "Junar" to host their Data.

• National level Open Data Portals such as "Data.gov.uk"

It is the very first Open Data Portal in EU and now it has been expanded to more than 20,000 different data sets covering various public sectors in UK. Even though the regime and Data catalogs are different from one another, major EU countries have published their data via national level data catalogs. Those portals are usually based on "CKAN", but the functionalities of their portals are customized according to their different preferences and requirements.

• PAN-Europe Open Data Portals

Based on "CKAN", this platform can currently host more than 50,000 data sets harvested from different data catalogs across EU. The Pan-Europe portal was developed by "LOD2 project" and their portal publishes data sets via linked Data approach and all data set's metadata can be accessed via "SPARQL" endpoints.

Conclusion

The adoption of the Data Revolution Policy like any other current governmental policy are meant to better the livelihood of all citizens of Rwanda. Specifically with the Data revolution policy and the recommendations drown from it, such as the Open Data portal among others; will not only increase public service levels and efficiency, but will also create new jobs and business opportunities to Rwandans.

Portals hereby extensively discussed, will offer data from various sector specific institutions of Rwanda. And in return this Data availability will encourage users to develop innovative applications for the community. Data will be directly searchable on the website of the portal and furthermore accessible in different file formats. Hints can be made of how these startups could look like and the solutions they can bring to the general society. Imagine a "Public spending open data". This would shade light on excessive spending of public resources if any and thus optimize more on the country budgeting of subsequent fiscal years. How about an "Open Data on Export", this can easily indicate what the most lucrative home products are and thus help in informed investment decisions.

Rwanda is an emerging country in terms of openness and the Ministry of ICT and Innovation is trying to catalyze this cultural shift that the Government of Rwanda has adopted, which is that of shifting from an agrarian economy basis to that of a knowledge based one.

Let's all get involved in facilitating this initiative.

By Victor Muvunyi