Some notes about the Irish Government’s open-data portal at https://data.gov.ie.

Ireland’s open data portal aims at promoting innovation and transparency through the publication of Irish Public Sector data in open, free and reusable formats.

Open data is information that is collected, produced or paid for by government bodies and made freely available for reuse. Almost all data that is not privacy sensitive can be published as open data with an open licence. The digital economy revolves around data. It can be used to help public administration work more efficiently and to improve the quality of their services. It also can be used by businesses to enhance their business models or to open new opportunities. Open data also provides information to citizens on matters that concern them such as local government, public services, public transport scheduling etc.

As of today there are over 10,000 datasets published on the portal by 120 publishers under various themes such as Economy and Finance, Energy, Environment, Education and Sport, Transport, Science and Technology, Health and more. The datasets are published in various formats including JSON-STAT, PX, csv format as well as some txt files, html, JSON and others. Some of the datasets have APIs. While the datasets can be accessed directly through the open data portal, they can also be accessed using an API. The site is built using CKAN which allows developers to write code that interacts with the open data portal. CKAN is a powerful data management system that makes data accessible – by providing tools to streamline publishing, sharing, finding and using data. CKAN is a tool for making open data websites and is used by national and local governments, research institutions and other organisations who collect a lot of data. Data is published in units called “datasets”. Datasets contain “metadata” (information about the data) and a number of “resources” which hold the data itself such as csv, excel, XML, PDF. CKAN can store the data internally or as a link with the resource itself being available somewhere else on the web. (On earlier CKAN versions, datasets were called “packages” and is still used in places today). Normally login is not needed to search and find data but is needed for all publishing functions.

Using the CKAN API you can get JSON-formatted lists of a site’s datasets, groups or other CKAN objects such as a package list, tag list or group list, get a full JSON representation of a dataset, resource or other object and search for packages or resources matching a query. Authorised users such as publishers who can create, update and delete datasets, resources and other objects. There is no authorization required for accessing the data.

To call the CKAN API, post a JSON dictionary in an HTTP POST request to one of the CKAN APIs URLs. The parameters for the API function should be given in the JSON dictionary. CKAN will also return its response in a JSON dictionary. The api actions used for this web application are the package_list, tag_list and organization_list as well as the package_search action with a query parameter as outlined earlier. There are some other api actions that I did not use for the final application. See aboutIrelandsOpenDataPortal for further information.