Projects related to open data currently constitute one of the most important government initiatives worldwide to meet societal demands for transparency and greater efficiency in the control of spending related to public budgets. To address these demands, various initiatives have been promoted by entities such as the Open Foundation Protocol to develop open standards and protocols that enable effective access to useful and relevant data for analysis and use in applications linked to public policies, oversight of resources managed by the government, and community actions.
Similarly, government projects to centralize data repositories related to public institutions, such as the federal government's open data portal and the Transparency Portal of the Comptroller General of the Union, as well as other similar initiatives promoted at other levels of public administration (state and municipal), help society access this information. Notwithstanding the notorious progress made in the use of open data as a result of these projects, government and society can significantly evolve in facilitating access to this data, especially automatically, through software applications.
Automating this access involves implementing, documenting, and publishing standard interfaces, also known as Application Program Interfaces (API), and making them available through well-known protocols widely used by analytical and software development platforms. The visible and immediate effect of this change is an extraordinary increase in productivity and effectiveness in the analysis of information, which becomes independent of manual user intervention for export/import actions, incorporates important metadata for better information processing, and is not restricted to a proprietary access and content recognition platform.
The results of this approach to interacting with and accessing public data (via API) for society and the government, enabled by, among other benefits, automation and the increased productivity indicated above, are extremely positive. To the extent that it is possible to reduce the time it takes for data to become available and the knowledge that can be gained from its analysis, the decisions of public agents that can be influenced by the information's content will be faster and more assertive.
This benefit can already be perceived, for example, by residents of New York City in the USA, who at the time of this article's publication already had access to over 1,100 datasets, most of them available through open protocols on their portal https://nycopendata.socrata.com/. Soon, these protocols should become a frequent means of accessing data across all government levels, especially in Brazil.