Uzbekistan's Open Data Portal — From a 2015 Cabinet Resolution to a Top-50 World Ranking

Uzbekistan's open data programme rests on two legal acts: Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 232 of 7 August 2015, 'On measures to further improve the Governmental portal of the Republic of Uzbekistan on the Internet with the provision of open data,' and Presidential Decree PP-4273 of 9 April 2019, which put the State Committee on Statistics in charge of coordinating, maintaining and updating the country's list of open datasets.

The resulting national portal, data.gov.uz (also reachable as data.egov.uz), now hosts more than 10,000 freely downloadable datasets from over 150 organisations, spanning education, health, the economy, population, culture and justice, in CSV, Excel, XML, JSON and RDF formats, navigable in Uzbek, Russian and English, with no registration required beyond stating an intended use. The government has also run hackathons to popularise the portal among software developers.

Independent reporting from the Uzbek outlet Kun.uz on the 2020 Open Data Inventory (ODIN) found the country's score jumped from 19 in 2018 to 63 in 2020 — a climb of 125 positions to 44th place worldwide and first in Central Asia, one of the two largest gains of any country that cycle. Uzbekistan's own State Statistics Committee has additionally reported a 6th-place world ranking by number of open-data sources and a 'Very High' rating on the UN's Open Government Data Index in both the 2020 and 2022 E-Government Surveys — claims consistent with, though not identical to, the independently verified ODIN gain.

Read the full analysis: https://data.gov.uz/en