By Vitalii Dubenskyi

Kyiv – Ukraine has considerably improved its Open Data position, according to the latest rankings from the Global Open Data Index . For the first time since rankings began in 2013, the country is now among the 50 most open nations.

Ukraine is now ranked 31^st as of this year, a significant improvement over 2015 when Ukraine was only 54 ^th.

The ranking – which takes into consideration various factors of transparency and openness in government, business and civil society – now places Ukraine above countries like Italy, Portugal, Greece and Israel and just behind Poland, Slovenia and Austria.

Taiwan, Australia and Great Britain lead the global rankings in first, second and third place respectively.

Government Drive For Openness

Open Knowledge International – the non-profit organization behind the research – names plenty of examples of improvement in this area for Ukraine.

The group from Cambridge, England, say that the country has made significant strides forward in becoming more open and transparent.

Singled out for praise was Ukraine's national Open Data Portal ( data.gov.ua), containing more than 38,000 datasets, and the Opendatabot service , that helps more than 70,000 people to navigate through gigabytes of registration data on Ukrainian companies and court filings.

Ukraine's implementation of the Open Government Partnership Initiative since 2016 has been significantly increasing the availability and quality of open data, say researchers.

The initiative includes five "big challenges": improving access to public services, enhancing integrity in public administration, better management of public resources, creation of safe communities and increase of corporate accountability.

More Transparency on Horizon

Last year, the Ukrainian government doubled the list of data sets that have to be publicly released by government agencies, and integrated open registry of beneficial ownership with the global Open Ownership Register, a website that combines data from company registers around the world.

Government figures here say it's not just about transparency and making non-profits happy; it's also good for business.

"In 2017 alone, open data enriched the Ukrainian economy by more than $700 million. If open data in Ukraine continues to gain momentum, by 2025 this figure could reach $1.4 billion," wrote the Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman on Facebook recently, referring to independent research from the Kyiv School of Economics.

While Ukraine scores highly on transparency related to government budgets, laws and draft laws, company registration and national statistics, there is still some room for improvement.

More can be done, for example, to make data on land ownership and the environment more open, research from Global Open Data shows.

According to a study on the European Data Market , the market size for Open Data (market of digital products and services) in 2020 is estimated to reach around 77 billion EUR and in 2025 can reach EUR 85 billion.

At the same time, analysts say that the EU data economy can eventually surpass the threshold of EUR 1 trillion.

Posted May 9, 2018.