Oman

Oman has made significant accomplishments in releasing government data to the public, but a lot of effort still needs to be made to make Omani government data open and accessible in the technical and legal sense.

Information collected and created by the Omani government covers all aspects of life, from topography and weather information to population and health statistics. The government uses this information to conduct its business, but afterwards it locks it up in boxfiles and hard drives that nobody has access to. This information can be of great benefit to businesses, academics, and society at large, but only if this information is open to the public technically and legally.

One of the biggest recent Omani achievements in the arena of open data is the establishment of the National Centre for Statistics and Information which was created in 2012 to collect national information and statistics and publish them for both domestic and international audiences. NCSI is doing a great job in publishing statistics about a variety of social and economic aspects of Omani in reports, and on Facebook and Twitter.

However, in order for this data to be utilised by businesses, academics, journalists, and others, NCSI must make its data “open”. NCSI is currently publishing its data in PDFs and image files, both of which are extremely difficult to process and manipulate. If a person wanted to extract NCSI data and process it to create a chart or develop an app, this data must be machine readable and available in bulk. This is not very difficult to do and can be done using simple file formats such as XML, CSV, or JSON.

Another major problem regarding the data presented by NCSI is that it is protected by copyright and no one can copy it, translate it, and even communicate it to the public without violating copyright law. Under Omani law, all works are automatically protected by copyright for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. There are very limited exceptions to this rule, such as the exemption of protection for certain official documents such as legislations and court decisions, but besides this all works created by the government as well as everybody else are protected by copyright. If the government wants the public to utilise government data, this data must be provided using an open license, such as a Creative Commons license, that allows anyone to copy the work without violating copyright law as long as the license conditions are respected.

Oman is expending a lot of its resources on the developments of its tourism sector and its SME sector. Imagine the apps that could be built if the Ministry of Tourism made the geolocation details of all the historic forts available in a digital format, the Ministry of Transport released an electronic version of the street maps, and the Oman News Agency made its photo library legally available for the public to use freely.

It seems that NCSI has plans for launching a Open Data portal, but the status of this project remains unknown. The Information Technology Authority of Oman also previously had a project for opening up government data, but the execution of the project was poor with no legal framework to make the data legally open and no logical structure to make the content helpful.

Oman is slowly moving towards the right direction with its government data initiatives, but it needs to get its act together and focus on delivering data solutions that truly answer the needs of the public technically and legally.