icegov2012 proceedings

New Perspectives for Electronic Government in Brazil:
The Adoption of Open Government Data in National and
Subnational Governments of Brazil
Ricardo Matheus
University of São Paulo
ricardomatheus@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
The development of information and communication technologies
(ICTs) enabled production of bases containing raw data which can
be freely manipulated, filtered or being crossed to build new
applications. These possibilities of using this raw data and its
manipulation have been called Open Government Data (OGD).
The aim of this paper is to present the State of Art of the Open
Government Data in Brazilian National, State and Municipal
governments. Some benefits that OGD have been promoted are:
transparency promotion, and, improvements of social control and
citizen participation. The methodology used is the literature
review mainly about concepts of Open Government Data and
three case studies about Brazilian governmental initiatives of
OGD Portals. It was conducted an exploratory study of Brazilian
initiatives National and Subnational governments that aims to
verify the Brazilian level of OGD based on the eight principles of
OGD and the five stars of open linked data, the last one was
created by Tim Berners-Lee to measure the level of open data in
websites. The final considerations reveal Brazilian initiatives
adopt almost the entire principles of OGD. Further, the initiatives
are in the third stage of a completely open linked data (three
stars).
Categories and Subject Descriptors
J.1 [Computer Applications]: Administrative Data Processing –
Government
General Terms
Management, Theory
Keywords
Electronic Government; Transparency; Social Control; Citizen
Participation; Open Government Data
1. INTRODUCTION
Recently, the Information and communications technology (ICT)
development have been bringing new possibilities for promotion
of transparency and availability of public data, mainly through the
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ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
Manuella Maia Ribeiro
Fundação Getúlio Vargas
maiamanuella@gmail.com
22
José Carlos Vaz
University of São Paulo
vaz@usp.br
internet. Through ICTs the promotion of transparency has been
increased because ICTs allowed an easier ambient to access data
and information of public information from governments. The
possibilities of using new technologies by governments to
promote transparency, social control and citizen participation are
constantly presented in the literature [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
The first phase of the transparency process of governments was
governmental portals of transparency, where several kind of
information, especially financial information, was published in
zipped format. This kind of publication is characterized by the
fact that it is the government who decides what and how it will be
seen. This applies to the publication of financial reports or data
non-interactively. A second phase is characterized by the
possibility of performing custom queries to databases. Some
interested parties could access government databases and interact
with them. This implies they could order structured queries
producing crossed researched of specific data or, at least allowing
filtering databases in search of detailed information. For example,
this applies to appointments to the financial implementation of the
Union, States and Municipalities in Brazil [2, 6, 7, 8, 9].
A new phase becomes possible more recently: the open
government data (OGD). Afforded by the development of ICTs,
OGD can go further publication of reports or queries to access the
databases. It became possible to offer database in its raw state, to
be freely manipulated, filtered or mixed with others, including
allowing the construction of new knowledge and applications by
civil society. Some of consequences of this new possibility of
governmental transparency are social control and citizen
participation through collaboration [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16].
However, the limits of them are not yet fully known. Neither its
boundaries were fully exploited [17, 18, 19].
Several new applications are emerging in some developed
countries such as United States, New Zealand, United Kingdom
and Australia, as well as movements on the part of organized
sectors of society who are pressing for its implementation [11, 12,
16, 17, 18]. The pioneering example is United States of America.
The federal government created a level of openness of
government information by creating unprecedented memo on
transparency and open government requires that all actions of the
ministries themselves were based on transparency, citizen
participation and collaboration between government and society.
In addition, the Ministry of Science and Technology created the
Open Government Initiative ("Open Government Initiative") to
effect the availability of open government data [20, 21].
While civil society organizations have emerged around the world
that pressure governments to open their data in open format. In
according with [21], in the United States, the Sunlight Foundation,
OMB Watch and the League of Women Voters have created a