16 april, the Open Data Roundtable with businesses participating was held in Astana. Around 50 companies from health, construction, real estate, agriculture and IT sectors familiarized with global best practices of Open Data use.

Information owned by government agencies is of great value to businesses and citizens. Public administration bodies gather and process big quantity of data which is already being published on integrated web resources in public domain. In Kazakhstan, this function is performed by the Open Data Portal, data.egov.kz. To date, 217 datasets are available on the Portal, and the number thereof is constantly increasing.

Re-use of up-to-date information from government agencies has a huge potential capacity for creating new innovation-based products. In the US’ dynamically evolving market, new online services and mobile apps based on open data are being launched.

At the Roundtable, the invited US experts representing the Open Data 500 Company told Kazakhstani businessmen which government agencies’ data would help develop new areas of business. In the course of the event, businessmen – with experts’ help – defined which governmental data they need to optimize and improve their performance.

“Today, we held the first Roundtable with representatives from business sector, mostly in order to explain what open data is and what benefits the businessmen would gain by using governmental data in their activities. Re-use of governmental data bears huge opportunities, both for creating new products and for further developing the existing ones. What is most important is that all this information is absolutely accessible to Kazakhstan citizens and businessmen for free”, Laura Manley, Director for Partnership and Programs, Center for Open Data Enterprise, remarked.

“In the UN Rating 2014, Kazakhstan rose by 10 positions and is ranked the 28^th as to e-Government development. With a view to improving the current Kazakhstan’s rating, the enhancement of “openness” indicators is required, which is one of the essential criteria in drawing up the rating. Government agencies’ “openness” includes providing the agencies’ up-to-date and reliable data to the public in a user-friendly format”, CEO of National Information technologies JSC Ruslan Yensebayev commented. 

It should be reminded that there is an example of successful use of open data. In October 2014, a contest was held among university students for development of new applications based on open data. The contest resulted in 24 mobile apps being developed.