Terms of use of public information put online in the form of open data

On September 19, 2016 the Government Commission for the Coordination of open government activities approved new Typical conditions for the use of public information put in the information and telecommunication network Internet in the form of open data.

According to the document, open data is the information put online by its owners in order to re-use and in a format suitable for automated processing without any interim changes in the manual mode.

In accordance with the p. 2.1 of the Art. 7 of the Federal Law №8-FZ «On providing access to information about the activities of state bodies and local self-government» dated February 9, 2009 public and local authorities put on the Internet public information on their activities in the form of open data for the use by the general public. There are no restrictions on use in regard to such information and it requires no special agreements or licenses.

In addition, governmental bodies, that put public data on the Internet, should ensure their reliability, actuality and general availability. Open data should not apply to information classified as state secret, and their use should not violate the rights of third parties.

Users can not be limited to the right to use open data for commercial and non-commercial purposes and are free to search, receive, transmit and distribute open data. However, users are obliged to operate with open data exclusively for purposes not being contrary to the legislation, and also refer to source of open data.

At the present time the backbone element of country's open data is the Portal of open data of the Russian Federation. The operator of the Portal is the Ministry of Economic Development. The portal is focused on actual information about open data of the federal authorities, bodies of regional and local authorities and other organizations. Among this information are: documented data sets, links and meta data sets, information about software products and information services founded on the basis of published data. As of December 2, 2016 the portal contained 11176 sets of open data. However, their number continues to increase due to regional authorities. Only in the third quarter of 2016 16 regions placed their open data for the first time. The demand for data, which are used in the development of new services created for the population and business, continues to grow. The amount of downloads of data sets has increased by 1,4 times compared to the first quarter of 2016. According to the number of published data sets the leaders are Tomsk, Novgorod, Tula, Yaroslavl and Amur regions. From federal agencies, based on the results of third quarter of 2016, among the leaders are the Department of Energy, Economic Development, Culture, the Federal Tax Service and the Federal Air Transport Agency.

Foreign experience shows that open data allow all interested developers to create services in the Internet, and the state - to stimulate the development of modern IT-business and improve instruments of public control over the activity of the supervisory authorities as one of the most important directions of improvement of the business climate in general.

The information and analytical system Globas-i, intended for bundled information and analytical support of business uses more than 100 official sources of information, including also open data.