Data.gov.be, Belgium’s federal open data portal, was relaunched last week. The new site merges two separate data portals managed by Fedict, Belgium's federal IT service agency, and the country’s Agency for Administrative Simplification. The portal itself does not maintain data sets, but aggregates and updates links to several thousand datasets maintained by Belgium’s public agencies.
The portal is one of the concrete results of Belgium’s open data strategy, reinvigorated in July. The Federal Cabinet wants to share data created and collected by the administration and public enterprises, publishing these under an open license so that citizens and businesses can use this data to develop creative applications.
The renewed site was unveiled at a workshop organised by Fedict on 12 January. The portal is managed by the Open Data Task Force, a joint effort by the Agency for Administrative Simplification and Fedict.
In a statement, Fedict explains that the Task Force will also respond to specific data requests. Citizens or companies that identify missing data sources can ask the Task Force to help make these data sets available.
More information:
Datagov.be
Announcement by Fedict
Datanews news item (in Dutch)
Datanews news item (in French)