Esri has announced the launch of a new site aimed to help citizens discover organisations sharing open data around the world and provide direct access to thousands of open government datasets. Citizens can search, download, filter and visualise this data through their web browsers or mobile devices.
Since July 2014, more than 1,200 organisations from all levels of government, including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the American cities of Raleigh, North Carolina; Tampa, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Muroran, Japan, have used Esri’s ArcGIS Open Data to configure custom open data sites to serve local citizens and businesses. Now the public can search across all these sites to find authoritative data by location and topic.
Esri is excited about the large number of organisations currently sharing open data and believe they have a great opportunity to boost global support for open data and open knowledge, said Andrew Turner, CTO of Esri’s DC R&D Center. As more of the 380,000 organisations the company works with across the globe begin to contribute open data, they will be able to help foster innovation by connecting the millions of datasets created by government agencies and shared through ArcGIS Open Data, he added.
Any organisation can make its data available through ArcGIS Open Data, and people can now discover this data by visiting opendata.arcgis.com.
Source: GIM International