Denmark Launches a New National Data Portal

In an effort to improve access to data held by the Danish public sector, the Danish Government has launched a new national data portal. The Data Portal will help data users by providing descriptions of and links to valuable public-sector data.

The Danish public sector has a long history of gathering and using high quality data for the purposes of public administration. Examples include geospatial data, population statistics, and data about the flora and fauna of Denmark. In recent years, public-sector organisations have increasingly made this data available to a wider range of users than was previously the case, much of it as open data. These datasets – such as the standardised basic public data and statistics from Statistics Denmark – are now used for a plethora of purposes by public and private actors alike.

Read more about basic public data

Read more about statistics from Statistics Denmark

Making data findable for re-use

Some users of public data find it difficult to navigate the data landscape. It might be hard to figure out which data is available from where, and which terms of use apply to what data. The new national data portal will help answer these questions by providing centralised, standardised descriptions of data, including licensing information, as well as links to access the data.

The launch of the Data Portal is part of a wider European effort to leverage data to solve major societal challenges and spur innovation and economic growth. The aim of the Danish portal is to become part of the cross-European ecosystem for data sharing, an effort which is supported by the portal’s use of the DCAT-AP-DK standard for metadata. DCAT-AP-DK is based on European and international standards and has been adopted as part of the common IT architecture for the Danish public sector by a steering group consisting of national, regional, and local government representatives.

Continuous development of the portal

On a practical level, the team behind the Data Portal developed the portal with inspiration from and in dialogue with comparable data portals in other EU member states, as well as with the European Data Portal. User demand will be the main driver for future development of the Danish portal, including which features and metadata are added. To achieve this, the Data Portal team will consult a wide range of channels for input on what to develop and is eager to gain feedback from its users about what data they are looking for. To support the effort to be demand-driven, an in-house team of developers working at the Danish Agency for Digital Government will implement changes to the portal using agile methodologies.