The Electronic Government Center has launched the open government data catalog, a register of public information collected by ministries. The purpose of the catalog is to encourage the opening of those public data held by authorities which have not been published yet or have been made public in closed formats that don’t allow their reuse. Another feature of the catalog is the identification of missing data in date.gov.md portal.

The Catalogue allows noticing the way central public authorities open the datasets. For a rapid identification of the data of interest, the datasets published by ministries can be sorted and filtered thanks to the new system of information organization.

The Open government data catalog is already published on date.gov.md and can be accessed at http://data.gov.md/raw/933. Currently, there are institutions that haven’t published yet any dataset on the portal. The catalog is periodically updated as more and more institutions will send their catalog. Each ministry will update its public data catalog, if necessary, as public information is identified.

The launch of the Open government data catalog data is included in the Action Plan for Open Government, approved by Government Decision on April 4, 2012. The Action Plan includes measures to increase transparency in government process, active participation of citizens in decision-making process, effective management of public resources and service quality improvement.

The members of civil society, private sector, journalists and ordinary citizens are invited to examine this Catalog, to suggest the data they want to find in it, to help identifying the public information omitted from the Catalog and use the open data already published on the portal. In this way, the citizens can contribute to Government transparency and information prioritization during the process of opening and publishing the public data.

Date.gov.md platform is a key pillar for the Technological modernization agenda of the governance (e-Transformation) and aims to facilitate citizens’ access to ministries and central public administration data. Open Data Initiative expresses the interest of Government in developing a transparent governance and application of innovations to support the citizens. In this way, the authorities are more responsive, and the citizens can actively participate in the decision-making process.

An improved version of date.gov.md platform was launched on December 14, 2011. So far there were opened 531 datasets by 35 central public authorities.
The public data are the data that have unlimited public access and consist of facts, concepts, phenomena, events, properties, indices, instructions etc., represented in a conventional form, proper for communication, interpretation or manual procession by automated means.