Launched in 2015, the Open, Useful and Re-usable data (OURdata) Index benchmarks governments’ efforts to design and implement national open government data policies. With subsequent editions released in 2017, 2019 and 2023, the Index has remained a valuable resource for policymakers and serves as a key public governance indicator, assessing the progress governments have made in ensuring open data to support policy reform.
The OECD definition of open data is “non-discriminatory data access and sharing arrangements where data is machine-readable and can be accessed and shared free of charge and used by anyone for any purpose, subject at most to requirements that preserve integrity, provenance, attribution and openness” (OECD, 2021[1]). The OURdata Index assesses policies for open government data, i.e. government data made available as open data. Government data refers to any data produced and held by public bodies at the central/federal level of government, and in some cases, depending on national context, data aggregated by and collected from local and regional levels, for example mobility data. The OURdata index does not measure the impact of open government data, but rather focuses on assessing governments' efforts to create the conditions necessary for making open data available and enable and encourage its reuse.
The composite OURdata Index consists of three pillars and nine sub-pillars. The three main pillars of the OURdata Index are:
Pillar 1: Data availability: Measures the extent to which governments have adopted and implemented formal requirements to publish open government data. It also assesses stakeholder engagement for identifying data demand and the availability of high-value datasets as open data. For example, this pillar assesses if a country has an open data strategy.
Pillar 2: Data accessibility: Measures the availability of requirements to provide open data in reusable formats, and the extent to which high-value government datasets are provided in open, timely and reusable formats, with good metadata quality, and through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). It also assesses stakeholder engagement on the central open data portal and to improve data quality. For example, the pillar measures the percentage of high-value open datasets that are accessible through a central open data portal.
Pillar 3: Government support to data reuse: Measures the extent to which governments play a proactive role in promoting the re-use of open government data inside and outside government. For example, it looks at events and partnerships with civil society and business actors to raise awareness about open government data and encourage re-use.