Open Data Council: plans of Rosleskhoz and Rospatent and disclosure of cartographic data

On March 16, the first meeting of the Open Data Council was held this year, the agenda of which was the open data of the Rosleskhoz, Rospatent, the disclosure of spatial data and information about government support measures. Let's see how it was and what came to this time.


The official press release is published on the website of the Open Government. In my opinion, it was drafted in a very specific way - the most attention was paid to the issue of publishing information on government support measures, the materials of which were very raw. The overall impression of the event is a bit controversial - on the one hand, the reports of representatives of state bodies were more prepared and did not duplicate handouts ( as at the previous council ), on the other hand, there were semantic and / or spelling errors in almost every document presented.
')
1. Approval of the departmental plan for the open data of Rosleskhoz

The first item on the agenda was presented by two reports: one from the representative of the Federal Forestry Agency, the second from the representative of the Public Council under the Federal Forestry Agency. Interestingly, the lists of relevant data sets, voiced in the reports, almost did not coincide. For the next two years, the Rosleskhoz includes the already published 15 datasets + data on procurement and contracts, data on anti-corruption, information on citizens' appeals, information on incomes, expenses, and property of civil servants.

The list of current sets offered by the Public Council includes data on the quarterly network, forest inventory, forest registry data by region of the Russian Federation, data on forest fire conditions and measures taken, etc. (the list is partially published on the website of the Public Council ).

One of the main reasons that make it difficult for the Rosleskhoz to publish open data is the lack of publicly available information about the quarterly network. The difficulty of publishing a quarterly network is due to the fact that “data on forest glades more than 4 m wide are“ restricted access information ”. However, at present, in about a quarter of all subjects of the Russian Federation, data on the quarterly network of minimally usable quality are available in the public domain ”(from the report of the Chairman of the Public Council under the Federal Forestry Agency EA Schwarz). The second reason was the lack of understanding of what data can be disclosed (it’s impossible not to add that the answer of the representative of the Analytical center “Forum” was to “open everything that is not a state secret or restricted access information”), and the third is to transmit authority at the regional level, due to which the data are generated not at the federal level, but at the regional level.

In general, a positive impression was left of the report - it is clear that the department approaches the publication of data not formally, but “with meaning”, with substantial support from the Public Council.

2. Approval of the departmental plan of Rospatent

The report of Rospatent included statistics on public services rendered, information on existing information systems and links to the AIS “State Sites Monitoring” rating, according to which Rospatent shows good results and ranks 11th among all federal authorities. I can hardly imagine how seriously we can report on the preparation of 10 data sets for 4 years, but we will focus on the plans of Rospatent for the next two years. Their opinion is twofold: on the one hand, it is planned to disclose interesting and sought-after information from inventories, utility models, industrial designs, trademarks and service marks, computer programs, etc., and on the other, disclosure of 39 data sets from these registries (at least once a month) will be performed only if additional funding is provided, the amount of which is comparable to the half-budget of the entire Rospatent (the amount was justified by the need to transform information systems to upload data).

A fair comment by Pavel Konotopov (Project Manager of the Open Government Analytical Center “Forum”) was that there is no direct relationship between funding and the number of data sets, and the current capabilities of information systems allow programmers to download data without any serious problems right now. Another comment was that in the already published data Rospatent excludes attributes that are not related to state secrets, thereby reducing the practical use of datasets.

In any case, the data from the registries for which the agency is requesting additional funding will be requested by all citizens engaged in patent research.

3. Disclosure of information included in the list of spatial data, information, in the form of open data (draft order of the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation No. 431-)

This is the shortest agenda item, and the draft order under discussion was not included in the materials for the meeting. The representative of the Ministry of Economic Development responded to the corresponding remark about the absence of materials that all draft orders are published on the portal regulation.gov.ru, and, if desired, it was possible to find everything. Indeed, after the Open Data Council on this portal, everything found, although the title of the draft order indicated in the materials of the Economic Development Ministry for the meeting does not agree with the name of the document published on regulation.gov.ru . According to Pavel Konotopov, who has studied in detail the new rules for the provision of cartographic information, obtaining a map of Russia at a scale of 1:25 000 for the company will cost about 45 - 450 million rubles, which is, of course, unacceptable for small and medium-sized businesses.

4. Regulations on the publication of information on government support measures provided by development institutions

This agenda item is described in more detail in the official press release . The discussion was devoted to the attribute set of the data set developed by the Analytical Center under the Government. The idea is that in Russia there are more than 1,700 government support measures, information about which cannot be obtained from a single source. The development of the data set structure, according to the speaker, took six months and included interaction with representatives of development institutions. I fully agree with the decision of the Open Data Council to send the document for revision, since even from the point of view of errors and typos in the data structure, the document looks very raw. For example, in the name of the attribute “Gender characteristic (YES / NO)” in the example of data it is indicated “Woman (female enterprise)”, financial indicators are somewhere measured in thousands, somewhere in the millions, and the lack of thesauri will lead to significant difficulties in analyzing data. Sergey Izrailit (Director of the Planning, Reporting and Evaluation of the Efficiency of the Skolkovo Foundation) spoke about the last problem, noting that 98% of the fields are not applicable to their support measures. The representative of the Russian Export Center noted that the wording of some fields would lead to contradictions of WTO rules.

Summing up , this meeting, in my opinion, was useful for representatives of Rospatent and, especially, for representatives of Rosleskhoz - both departments came with prepared questions about the problems they faced when preparing plans for openness (Rospatent has a problem with the publication of graphic images , Rosleskhoz - the lack of open access data on the quarterly network). The report of the Public Council of Rosleskhoz, despite the specificity of the presentation in the handouts, leaves a positive impression on the work of the Public Council. As for the cartographic data and dataset on measures of state support, one and the other must still work and work :).