Datos Abiertos Bogotá: An Open-Licence Rule the Catalogue Half-Keeps
Bogotá's district open-data portal, launched in 2017 and run by the cadastre agency UAECD through the IDECA spatial-data infrastructure, held 1,900 datasets from 60 publishing entities when its CKAN API was counted on 26 July 2026 — below the 2,200 the city claimed in 2023. Unusually for the region, the portal publishes a licence rule of its own: datasets must carry "términos de uso y licenciamiento abierto", citing Ley 1712 de 2014, and the site displays an Open Definition badge. The catalogue mostly keeps it — 1,181 CC BY 4.0, 419 CC BY-SA 4.0, 103 CC0 — but 96 datasets sit under non-commercial licences that rule excludes, 3 are tagged "Other (Not Open)", 52 say "License Not Specified" and 12 carry no licence field at all. Currency is the weaker half: 664 datasets had been modified in the previous twelve months, leaving 1,236 untouched.
Counted from the operator's own CKAN API on 26 July 2026: 1,900 datasets, of which 1,737 carry an Open Definition-conformant licence, 99 carry a non-commercial or explicitly non-open licence, and 64 carry none (52 "License Not Specified" plus 12 with no licence field). 664 datasets were modified in the preceding twelve months; 1,236 were not.
🎓 Lesson
A written open-licence rule is not the same as a licensed catalogue. Bogotá states the rule on the portal itself and anchors it in national law — further than São Paulo, Shanghai or Bangkok go — yet 99 datasets still carry licences the rule forbids and 64 carry none. The harder gap is upkeep: two-thirds of the catalogue went a year without an update.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Sources
↗ Datos Abiertos Bogotá — CKAN API (authority, primary count)Establishes every counted figure in this entry, queried 2026-07-26. package_search rows=0 returns count 1900. The license_id facet returns CC-BY-4.0 1181, CC-BY-SA-4.0 419, CC0-1.0 103, notspecified 52, CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0 36, CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 29, CC-BY-NC-4.0 24, other-open 19, odc-odbl 10, cc-nc 7, other-closed 3, and ODC-BY-1.0, ODbL-1.0, gfdl, other-pd and uk-ogl at 1 each — summing to 1888. The query fq=-license_id:["" TO *] returns 12, accounting for the remaining datasets, which carry no licence field. Spot-verified with separate calls: fq=license_id:CC-BY-4.0 returns 1181, fq=license_id:notspecified returns 52, and the four non-commercial licences queried together return 96. Currency: fq=metadata_modified:[2025-07-26T00:00:00Z TO NOW] returns 664 and its complement returns 1236. organization_list returns 79 registered organisations; the organization facet shows 60 with at least one dataset. sort=metadata_created asc returns an oldest record of 2017-12-20. The Socrata discovery API (api.us.socrata.com) returned HTTP 404 for this domain — the portal is CKAN, not Socrata.
↗ Datos Abiertos Bogotá — Acerca de (authority, licence policy)Establishes the licence rule verbatim: "Licenciados de forma abierta: Los conjuntos de datos publicados deben contar con términos de uso y licenciamiento abierto, es decir, no deben estar sujetos a ninguna normativa de derecho de autor, patente, marca registrada o regulaciones de acuerdo de secreto", explicitly cited to "(Ley 1712 de 2014. Literal J, artículo 6. Definiciones.)". The page carries an Open Definition badge linking to opendefinition.org. It also establishes the operator — administered and updated by the UAECD through IDECA — and the origin as an initiative of the Alta Consejería Distrital de TIC via ViveLab Bogotá of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
↗ Ley 1712 de 2014, art. 6 lit. j (national statute)Establishes the statutory definition the portal invokes: open data are primary data in standard, interoperable formats held by public bodies and made available to any citizen "de forma libre y sin restricciones" so third parties can reuse them and build derived services. Note the limit of this instrument — it defines open data, it does not by its own terms mandate a named licence on a municipal catalogue, so Bogotá's rule is a portal policy resting on a statutory definition rather than a licensing command of the São Paulo Lei 17.901/2023 type.
↗ Alcaldía de Bogotá — portal renewal (authority, 2025 figures)Dated 10 March 2025. Establishes the 2025 redesign ("renueva su imagen y herramientas de consulta", data grouped by theme and entity) and the city's own current claims of "más de 2.000 datos abiertos" and "70 entidades distritales" — both below the draft's 2023-vintage figures and consistent with the 1,900 counted here.
↗ Alcaldía de Bogotá — 2,200 datasets from 69 entities (authority, superseded)Dated 7 September 2023. The origin of the draft's "2,200 datasets from 69 entities" claim: "más de 2.200 conjuntos de datos, publicados de 69 entidades del Distrito Capital". Retained to date the claim and show it is superseded, not to support it — the API counted 1,900 on 2026-07-26. Also confirms UAECD/IDECA as administrator.
↗ Alcaldía de Bogotá — how the platform works (authority, counterweight)Dated 12 March 2025. Establishes the city's self-criticism: Secretary General Miguel Silva Moyano is quoted saying the District wants to centralise information because some of its portals hold old, outdated information. Flag for the editor: the fetch returned the quote in translation, so the exact Spanish wording was not captured and is not reproduced here; the entry relies on the counted currency figures, not on this quote. No independent evaluation of this portal — no Open Knowledge-style index, national transparency ranking scoped to Bogotá, or academic assessment — was found; the nearest academic work (Redalyc, "Comportamiento del uso de datos abiertos en Colombia 2016-2021") and the OECD OURdata index both assess Colombia nationally and are deliberately not imported.
↗ Gobierno Abierto Bogotá (authority, scope boundary)Retained only to document why it is NOT part of this entry. It is a separate platform under the Secretaría General, not the UAECD, built on the open-government model set by Directiva 005 de 2020 and hosting MapaInversiones budget and contract tracking — a different operator, instrument, start date and artefact from the 2017 data catalogue. The city launched a further portal, "Datos para la Transparencia", on 4 March 2025 because Bogotá had more than 30 separate data platforms.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Datos Abiertos Bogotá: An Open-Licence Rule the Catalogue Half-Keeps” — Bogotá, Colombia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/bogota-open-data/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
