A new chance for open data

The open data portal, on which data marked as public and which institutions are certainly obliged to give to interested parties for inspection, is published for citizens, the economy... after almost two years, it is back in operation, in a new edition.

The new "old" portal was presented yesterday by the Ministry of Public Administration (MJU), and the minister Marash Dukaj, among other things, he said that they worked "very actively" in that department, not only to establish that portal, but also to establish standards "following the example of advanced countries".

"This is not the end of our work. MJU will work on promoting open data, promoting the portal... It is very important that other institutions be proactive and define data sets that they can create and publish in an open format," he said yesterday at the conference.

The open data portal is located at the old address, data.gov.me. It was developed with the support of the European Union and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and, it was announced yesterday, "already contains close to 400 data sets".

"Open data is the concept of publicly available data in such a way that anyone can freely use and republish it, without restrictions by authors or other control mechanisms. The term open data has been used since 2008 and is gaining popularity after the initiative of certain countries to open their data on portals such as data.gov, data.gov.uk", says the explanation of the term "open data" on that platform.

Dukaj also announced yesterday that the new Law on Free Access to Information (SPI) will be completed next year Lidija Ljumović from the Department of Public Administration said that she believes that the open data portal will help to reduce the number of requests for SPI.

As announced yesterday, the Parliament of Montenegro will establish a special open data portal.

Cyber ​​attack

In Montenegro, the open data portal was presented for the first time in July 2018, which was a legal obligation resulting from the amendments to the Law on Free Access to Information (SPI) from May 2017.

However, the portal was not functional for some time, and the Dukaj department previously told "Vijesta" that the reason for this was a cyber attack on the IT infrastructure of the Government of Montenegro that took place in August 2022.

"Due to a cyber attack on the state IT infrastructure in August 2022, the portal is not functional. The open data portal (data.gov.me) is currently located on servers that were affected by cyber attacks and need to be migrated to a completely new server environment to provide the highest possible degree of cyber protection according to best practice recommendations. The migration process of this IS will be completed when the appropriate conditions are met for the implementation of this process. Otherwise, the recovery of information systems itself is a long-term process that takes place according to the service recovery plan. The establishment of the Open Data portal is expected by March 10, 2023 at the latest," the department told "Vijesta" in February 2023.

Before the cyber attack, 20 institutions published 197 data sets from 15 areas on that website. While it was online, as the public administration department said, the interested parties mostly downloaded sets of data on MPs' earnings and a list of active and deleted non-governmental organizations.

Registers, earnings, vignettes...

Neither then, nor on the new platform, was the register of political parties published, but such information can only be obtained upon request from the competent department.

According to the analytics of the new portal, the most data sets are published by the Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation (84), the portal also contains the data of the user "Ministry of Education", which is marked as "inactive", but has the second highest number of published data sets (73). . Followed by the Directorate for Statistics (Monstat), National Parks of Montenegro...

The data published by the Department of Education refer to the number of students in elementary secondary and music schools, by different categories - grade, gender, language of instruction, type of property... The same data were published for preschool institutions and resource centers.

In the category of the most frequently edited data sets are the salaries of deputies, appointed, elected and appointed persons in the Parliament of Montenegro, the number of vignettes issued for the year 2024, the annual gross domestic product, lawyers who have undergone training for the representation of children, retail trade. In that category are also the number of systematized/filled jobs by title category, the reserve list of scientific and research projects for possible co-financing, the register of facilities for the hygiene and beautification of pets, and the black list of tax debtors with a cross-section of debt as of September 30, 9. .

Application

On the portal, in the "Examples" category, there is an example, "Generalized habitat map of Serbia", which shows how spatial data is used. No other examples are given.

"Vijesti" previously wrote about how data from the open data portal could be used. Interviewer, founder of software company Codingo Ivan Radunović then he said that the data being processed should be updated, ideally even arrive in real time, that there is a set of protocols for communication between programs that will provide data download (API) and that they do not require manual action by one or more employees .

"Codingo" created the Open Montenegro application at the Hackathon "Let it be available and useful", using the then available data from the data.gov.me portal, whose role is to facilitate the business environment. The second and third teams, Data Design and MSSS, created an application for the use of information related to the NGO sector, i.e. a web application for digital tourism.

Radunović then gave the "News" some examples that indicate the importance of the published data. Thus, among other things, he gave an example of data on the import of goods to Montenegro, that they are published by type, quantity, price, dates.

"If we look only at agricultural products, that data would be of immeasurable importance for domestic producers, because it would be a guide for them what they should do and where they have a chance and where they don't," the "Vijesti" interlocutor explained at the time.

At that time, he also said that well-organized data could be helpful for businessmen to learn from other people's mistakes and suggested that data on misdemeanor orders and penalties for legal and responsible persons who issued inspections be made public and easy to read, based on which, how said, other companies could, by activity code, search all orders and correct potential deficiencies in advance.

According to him, if the Ministry of Internal Affairs published records on the entry of foreigners into Montenegro and the countries from which they come, it would give a clear signal to the agencies and tourism workers from which countries the guests come, by which means of transport...

"And from meta data and other related registers, more important information could be extracted", he adds.

As a way to make the state more open, while at the same time enabling control, Radunović previously proposed a service that displays real-time data on the spending of all institutions financed from the budget.

A similar service is implemented by the Institute of Alternatives, which on the mojnovac.me platform, through which the user has insight into state finances and where it is easy to research details of the state budget, analyze transactions from the treasury, learn more about public procurement and monitor the operations of public companies.

Globally, several mobile applications have been created to present public air quality data visually and clearly to citizens. These data are also used by television companies and, through a simple graphic solution, they inform citizens about the level of air pollution in news broadcasts. The data used for these purposes comes from institutions that perform measurements, but they have made it easy to track and download. Additionally, as Radunović emphasized, the data is up-to-date...