Cape Town Open Data Portal
Cape Town runs its own catalogue, and owns it outright: the ArcGIS organisation behind the portal is registered to the City of Cape Town and every dataset is published by a municipal account. Counted through the platform API on 26 July 2026, the portal's three catalogue groups held 256 items, spatial and tabular together — 178 feature services, 25 CSV files, 21 Excel workbooks, 6 PDFs and a scattering of others, plus 18 application templates that are not data. Licensing is where it gets interesting. A Council-approved Open Data Policy exists and has been revised twice, most recently as policy 27781 on 3 December 2020, but it names no licence. It says only that use of the portal will be subject to its Terms of Use, and that those terms will conform with open data principles. Every record inspected carries the same link to that municipal terms page in place of a standard instrument, and in 200 records sampled from the platform index all 200 were classified as a custom licence. No Creative Commons deed, public-domain dedication or other recognised open licence appears anywhere in the catalogue. Cape Town breaks no rule of its own — the rule simply never names the thing a re-user needs to read.
📊 Impact
Counted 26 July 2026 via the ArcGIS sharing API: 256 items in the portal's three catalogue groups (178 feature services, 25 CSV, 21 Excel, 18 application templates, 6 PDF, 3 CAD, 2 document links, 1 KML collection, 1 Word, 1 StoryMap). Licence sample: 200 of 200 platform records classified 'custom', i.e. a non-standard licence; a complete per-record census of the 256 could not be obtained because the platform's licence filter and aggregation endpoints return errors. The City's own portal copy still advertises 'over 106 datasets' and a 2015 launch with 29.
🎓 Lesson
A policy that promises terms conforming to open data principles, without naming an instrument, is a self-assessment rather than a grant. Cape Town applies its licence more consistently than Toronto or Bogota apply theirs — but what is applied is a link to a municipal terms page, not a licence a re-user can read once and rely on.
Sources
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Cape Town Open Data Portal” — Cape Town, South Africa. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/cape-town-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.
🔗 Related projects
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