2017 was a good year for open data in Ukraine.
The country climbed 23 positions and ranked 31st in the Global Open Data Index.
The government opened the registry of beneficial ownership and integrated it with the global Open Ownership Register, a website that combines data from company registers around the world.
And at the end of December, the Cabinet of Ministers expanded the list of data sets that have to be publicly released by government agencies – the number of sets rose from 302 to 600.
More challenges
Those are big achievements, says Kateryna Onyiliogwu, open data lead at the U.S. Agency for International Development and United Kingdom-funded Transparency and Accountability in Public Administration and Services project.
But with greater openness come more challenges of improving the quality and usability of data so that it actually serves its purpose and provides value. Otherwise, the government will simply pour out a plethora of documents that nobody looks at.
Today, Ukrainians can already access and use more than 28,745 files published on data.gov.ua. But many citizens are still unaware of the possibilities of open data, the which has power to increase public sector transparency and efficiency, improve business practices and fight corruption and tax evasion. Open data has become crucial source of information for businesses, civil activists, and investigative journalists in Ukraine.
Indeed, there’s already a lot of data online, but this is mostly raw data that is impossible to find or read without special skills and tools.
Onyiliogwu of TAPAS project says that in Ukraine government agencies release their data in a form it was collected and stored, and the quality often depends on the condition of IT systems – which varies from agency to agency.
“It’s not government’s job to provide easy-to-use data – their job is to publish it,” Onyiliogwu said in an interview with the Kyiv Post. “And that’s where businesses and NGOs should step in and bring that data to the public. There is a demand.”
Open data market
Open data also brings monetary benefits to governments, through cost reductions and improved decision making processes, and creates business opportunities for private ventures and data analysts.
The European open data market amounted to almost €60 billion in 2016. By 2020, the EU data economy is expected to increase to €100 billion by creating new digital products and data jobs, and reduce government costs by €1.7 billion.
In Ukraine, a study into the economic benefits of open data carried out by the Kyiv School of Economics is to be released soon.
There are several data aggregators and online services that search for specific information across multiple public registers, collect it, and convert figures into digestible graphs, maps, tables. New startups that use open data for various purposes – from finding blood donors to tracking coal prices – pop up every year.
One of them, OpenDataBot, is designed to protect entrepreneurs from corporate raiding. The bot monitors government company registers and court records and notifies a user of any changes about their business registration documents via Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Skype or Viber.
Founder Oleksiy Ivankin and his partners created a bot after their company in Dnipro was raided. “Our shares in one of our businesses were stolen, and we found out about it a week later. By that time the company’s assets had been siphoned off,” he said in an interview with local media.
Last year almost 70,000 people used OpenDataBot, according to the service statistics.
Not only do independent services make public data more accessible to general public, they also act as outside observers of government processes hidden behind figures and jargon.
Sergi Milman, CEO of YouControl data aggregator, said his service noticed that some records would disappear from the State Register of Court Decisions, or would be uploaded again with backdated information.
“By the end of 2015, the discrepancy between our database of copies of court decisions and the state register amounted to 50,000 records,” he told the Kyiv Post. “We didn’t know why some records were removed, but it shows the importance of independent organizations, like ours, in monitoring government data.”
YouControl is currently under investigation by the Security Service of Ukraine, known as the SBU. The security agency declared CEO Milman was under suspicion of interfering in state networks and selling state-owned data, including that to which access is limited, from some public registers such as United state register of legal entities and individual entrepreneurs, United state register of court decisions, and United information system of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine. Prosecutors estimated the damages to the state were worth nearly Hr 6.5 million ($226,200).
Milman called the charges “absurd,” citing the law on open access to public information and the 2015 decree that guarantees access to open public data, and allows it to be copied and used for commercial purposes.
YouControl allows users to search records on half a million companies and individual entrepreneurs across over 40 Ukrainian public databases and international sanctions lists. The data is compiled into comprehensive reports, with the company’s list of owners and directors, debts, and court history. Moreover, the service shows connections between companies through business owners.
According to the company, today the website has over 5,000 paid subscribers including the National Bank of Ukraine, the National Agency on Corruption Prevention, and leading businesses, media, and non-governmental organizations.
Open data experts would not comment on the YouControl case, saying they didn’t know the technical details of the case.
The SBU did not reply to a request for comment.
