Step 3: Publishing to the Open Data Portal


Once a dataset has been prepared in accordance with open data’s technical guidelines, it’s ready to be published on the Open Data Portal!  

Roles and responsibilities

During the publishing phase, divisions should… The Open Data Team provides support by…
  • Collaborate with the Open Data Team to establish automated publishing pipelines where possible
  • Collaborate with the Open Data Team to craft a dataset page, providing users with additional context and information to help them use data effectively
  • Ensure datasets are published according to planned mitigations
  • Maintaining and continuously improving the City’s Open Data Portal
  • Providing guidance on how to prepare open data so that it complies with City policy and provides high value to users
  • Collaborating with divisions to create publishing pipelines and dataset pages

Automated publishing

It is best practice for open datasets to be published automatically, meaning changes or additions to the dataset can be published without human intervention. This ensures data is provided to the public in a timely fashion and reduces the administrative burden for City staff.   

The Open Data Team can work with divisions to identify if and how to automate publishing. This is typically achieved using one of the following methods:  

  • API connection  
  • SQL Database connection  
  • Reading from files put onto a shared drive, e.g. SharePoint  

Manual publishing

Although it is strongly recommended to create an automated data pipeline for publishing your open dataset, manual updates may be appropriate for smaller datasets with infrequent updates, or in cases where automated publication is not possible due to other technical constraints.