Researchers, university professors, students, entrepreneurs, representatives of Civil Society Organizations, and other citizens will benefit from the publication of open data by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE). All surveys, statistics, and indicators prepared by the institute will be published in an open format. Released last week, the availability schedule is in the IBGE Open Data Plan (PDA) for the next biennium.
“IBGE's mission is to portray Brazil with the information necessary to understand its reality and exercise citizenship. Therefore, for the institute, it is fundamental to provide transparency to the data produced,” explains Arnaldo Barreto, substitute IT director at IBGE. For him, the development of the PDA by the agency is a milestone for the implementation of a planning and coordination tool for data dissemination actions.
Data and metadata from the Central Register of Enterprises, the Agricultural Census, the Demographic Census, and the Broad National Consumer Price Index (IPCA) are examples of surveys and indicators that have already been made available in an open format by IBGE. Open data from the Population Count, the National Classification of Economic Activities, the Annual Survey of Services, and the Survey of Ethnic-Racial Characteristics of the Population are also published.
According to Barreto, the publication of open data for society is a gain for the design and development of government actions. “The discussion of public policies between citizens and the government becomes more mature, as it is based on official facts and data, built with internationally accepted methodologies and collected in a transparent manner,” says the substitute director.
Open Data
The release of the PDA by IBGE complies with the provisions of Decree No. 8,777 of May 2016, which established the Open Data Policy of the Federal Public Administration (APF). Data is open when it can be processed and worked on by people and machines. Any citizen can freely use, reuse, and redistribute it, subject at most to the requirement to credit its authorship.
“According to the decree, all federal agencies must prepare their planning, and the Open Data team of the Ministry of Planning is available to assist agencies in this work,” says Marcelo Pagotti, Secretary of Information Technology of the Ministry of Planning, Development, and Management (MP).
The Open Data Portal (dados.gov.br) currently has 1,122 datasets in open format.
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