In a new UN report ranking the world’s e-governments, France has (surprisingly?) come out on the top in Europe, and fourth in the world, on its government access and services online.
Back in February, I interviewed Henri Verdier about Etalab’s work on Data.gouv.fr, France’s open data platform. As a reminder, open data is the idea that certain information should be freely available to everyone to reuse as they wish, without any copyright restriction.
Read more: Frankreich will Breitbandausbau mit 20 Milliarden Euro beflügeln
The UN’s E-Government survey 2014 puts the country at the head of European nations, number four in the world, behind South Korea, Australia and Singapore.
The UK comes in 8th place, dropping from third place which it held two years ago.
Some 230 data sets covering citizenship, transportation, geographical data, public spaces, public procurement, finances, culture, young people and sports were made available on the portal in various open standards and file formats. The data sets are licensed under an ODbL license, which grants unrestricted and free of charge re-use of the data. The only condition for data re-use is the attribution of the source and, in the case of redistribution of (enriched) data, the use of a similar license.