Open Data Institute goes global, with nodes opening up across US and elsewhere

The UK’s Open Data Institute (ODI) -- a government-funded company that helps to open up publicly-funded datasets and that also incubates startups in the field -- recently said that governments around the world were keen to emulate the model in their countries. This is now happening.

The ODI (which is co-led by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee) announced the beginning of what it said would become a “substantial international open data network,” starting with 13 “ODI nodes” around the world. Two of these are beta-phase national centers of excellence, in the US and Canada, that will work with the public sector, non-governmental organizations and the private sector. Eight (Dubai, Chicago, North Carolina, Paris, Trento, Manchester, Brighton and Leeds) are city- or region-based nodes that will undertake research and development, provide training and publish data with an ODI Open Data Certificate, which is a standardized way of describing the data’s format, update regularity and so on.