Exciting news comes from the developing country that is Indonesia: a new data portal! As one of countries with the biggest populations in the world, as well as one of the most varied in terms of culture, one can only imagine what kind of data that Indonesia has. And last September with the launching of the Indonesian national data portal, we finally got a glimpse of that treasure trove of data.

The Indonesian national data portal project started as an effect of Indonesia becoming the Chair of the Open Government Partnership initiative in 2013; holding this position, the Indonesian government started pushing for more domestic projects on open government. As it turned out, one of them happened to be the national data portal. The national data portal project is done under the care of the presidential unit for monitoring, control, and oversight (UKP4), a special unit that has been given presidential mandate to monitor and evaluate government agencies that have been created under the previous president of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The project is also supported by international agencies such as the World Bank.

After much effort, the Indonesian national data portal, aptly named data.id, finally launched! It now host 816 datasets from 24 state institutions & local governments and consisted of many kinds of data such as development data, health data, economic data, and demographic data of Indonesia. All the data is currently licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

The launching of the Indonesian data portal marks a very interesting starting point for Indonesians. It shows that data is starting to be regarded as something that has high value for the Indonesian people, and by using the data portal they have started to collect all the data in an organized manner and opened it up freely to everyone. There is still much to do however, with the datasets mainly submitted by a small subset of the state institutions and the local governments; also, all the data is currently in Indonesian only, but nevertheless, it is a good first foray for Indonesians into the world of data.

Check the Indonesia data portal here : data.id