Open Government, Ireland

About Open Government, Ireland

Data.gov.ie is Ireland's open government data portal, built on CKAN 2.9, providing a REST API for retrieving and searching datasets, groups, and other catalog objects. The API supports actions such as listing packages and tags, retrieving full JSON representations of datasets and resources, and searching packages or resources by query. Documentation for the underlying CKAN API is available online.

Datasets published on the platform must be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) at minimum, machine-readable in an open format such as CSV, JSON, or XML, and compliant with the DCAT-AP metadata standard. The site's source code, including the data.gov.ie CKAN extension and related extensions (ckanext-archiver, ckanext-harvest, ckanext-spatial, ckanext-os, ckanext-qa), is publicly available on Github.

The resource is intended for developers, researchers, businesses, and citizens seeking access to Irish public sector datasets, and includes a page for suggesting new datasets to be published. It is maintained by the Open Data Team within Ireland's Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation.

Key features

• CKAN 2.9-based API for retrieving datasets, groups, and other CKAN objects
• Search endpoints for packages and resources via package_search and resource_search
• JSON-formatted dataset listing via package_list and tag_list actions
• Datasets published in machine-readable open formats (CSV, JSON, XML) under CC-BY licence
• DCAT-AP compliant metadata for datasets
• Open source code available on Github for the data.gov.ie CKAN extension

Frequently asked questions