Master Class on Open Data Awareness Raising by Land Portal

Laura Meggiolaro and Lissette Mey from Land Portal moderating the Master Class on Open Data Awareness

Laura Meggiolaro and Lissette Mey from Land Portal opened the Master Class as pre-session event at ILDC 2018 to raise awareness on the open data system and the challenges thereof.

Access to information is crucial to achieve good land governance. Enormous amount of information are published in the web everyday, yet the issue of accessibility, consistency and reliability still remain. India being one of the most advanced Open Data Policy in the world, still ranked low in the global Open Data barometer.

Across most countries, data on land are inaccessible. The reason being, extreme fragmentation and wealth of information, many find it difficult and time consuming while accessing a particular data from the source. Land Portal has been working on the theory of change around these lines and with time, they have managed to overcome these barriers. Land Portal, believed that the solution to these issues in accessing data would be developing open data for public.

Laura defined Open Data as “The data that can be freely used (modified) and redistributed (shared) by anyone.”

For open knowledge intervention, Land Portal have outlined FAIR principles for open data system, which narrated as Findable (easily discoverable on the web), Accessible (available for anyone without barrios viz. payment/ long in etc.), Inter-operable (needs to be in formats that allow machines to read and understand) and Re-usable (openly licensed that allows users to use and build on data and sufficient information about source of information).

Zooming in on the concept of interoperability, it is important that machines understands data. Now that we live in an era of open data, easy availability of data is important. Because machine can connect data sets and database at a speed and efficiency much beyond what humans can do. It is the machines that help us establish an information ecosystem. Thus, Land Portal act as a big repository of data and procure knowledge from different sources on various aspects of land development.

Further, in every step of the Policy Cycle, usage of data is very important, starting from identifying an issue for addressing the policy, in creating an awareness, in discussing by creating a dialogue or debate in the political space and in designing the policy and monitoring. For instance, while monitoring a policy or a programme, data plays a vital role as it helps to analyse the targets and the achievements of different indicators. 

Another approach is localization, as local information are underrepresented at the global information landscape due to the lack of attitude, capacity, technical or legal issues. Hence, search engines do not show the data sought for. To address this issue, Land Portal identify local information, building capacities and infrastructures to cover those invisible information/ institution who do not make investment on data management. In many cases, various sources show different values of the same topic, where Land Portal pitch in to harmonizing these data.

India pilot by NRMC has developed a methodology which could be used as a tool in generating data. 59% of the data are provided on land and looking at the affordability of land information. 82.2% of the data are available for free and paid access are for only 6.9%. Although there are open data available and the government making efforts to make it more accessible, but there are many constraints since only 10% is licensed as open data. Everyone publishing data should feel responsible to publish legally and technically open.

“It needs an attitude in sharing data and one should know how to share data” commented by Pranab. Hence, considering the formats that are readable by machines and using standardized keywords is important as machines do not digest the variations.