Dublinked: the Dublin Region's open data platform

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-07

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means

Dublinked opened in November 2011 as Ireland's first regional open-data platform — Dublin City Council with Fingal, South Dublin and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown county councils, curated by NUI Maynooth on a platform IBM Research supplied for the start-up phase — and was relaunched on CKAN in 2016 under Smart Dublin. It is still the region's source of record rather than a museum piece: Ireland's national portal data.gov.ie harvests it daily, and Fingal's and South Dublin's catalogues arrive through automated ArcGIS harvesters that last ran on the morning of 7 August 2026. Dublin City Council is the weakest of the four partners on its own regional platform: 159 datasets against Fingal's 412, one added across five months, and 35 of the portal's 59 broken resource links. The portal publishes that broken-link count itself, on a statistics page whose visitor and session rows are entirely blank.

Live 📅 since 2011

Outcome🔄 Ongoing

Evidence🏛️ Official

Run bySmart Dublin, on behalf of Dublin City Council, Fingal County Council, South Dublin County Council and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council; CKAN platform managed by Derilinx

Scale🗺️ Regional

FundingThe four Dublin local authorities via Smart Dublin; IBM Research provided the technology platform for the 2011 start-up phase

📊 Impact

929 datasets on 7 August 2026 and not one without a named licence: 488 unversioned 'Creative Commons Attribution', 411 'CC-BY-4.0' with an empty licence URL, 27 CC0 and 2 CC BY-NC. The portal's own compliance page counts 927 of them as open-licensed — correctly excluding the two non-commercial sets — alongside 59 broken resource links and 5 datasets with an API.

🎓 Lesson

Full licence coverage is not the same as a legible licence. Dublinked names one on all 929 datasets, but the two tokens that carry 97% of the catalogue each drop half of what a reuser needs: 488 records point at a version-agnostic page listing CC BY 1.0 through 4.0, and 411 name CC-BY-4.0 with no deed behind it. The coverage is a by-product of automated harvesters, not of a rule — the platform's own guidance merely asks publishers to 'consider these licences first'. And documented reuse ages faster than the data: the official Dublinked page still says its live-data area is 'powered by Dublin Dashboard', a dashboard whose address now redirects to a university exhibition page.

📡 Data & IoT Open data Digital government

Sources

↗ Dublinked CKAN API — package_search, license_id facetCounted directly against the platform's own API on 7 August 2026, twice, with identical results. Returns 'count': 929 and five licence buckets: cc-by 488, CC-BY-4.0 411, cc-zero 27, cc-nc 2, other-open 1. 488+411+27+2+1 = 929 exactly, so no dataset is left without a licence value. package_show on planning-applications2-fcc2 returns license_id 'CC-BY-4.0', license_title 'CC-BY-4.0' and license_url null; the cc-by records return license_url 'http://www.opendefinition.org/licenses/cc-by'. The two cc-nc records (3D Data Hack Dublin) carry license_url 'http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/'; the single other-open record is 'SCATS Detector Volume data Feb - April 2018 DCC' with no licence URL.

↗ Dublinked CKAN API — organization facet and per-organisation licence cross-tabQueried 7 August 2026. Thirteen publishing organisations. The four local authorities hold 911 of the 929: Fingal 412, South Dublin 231, Dublin City Council 159, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown 109. The remaining 18 come from national and other bodies (National Transport Authority 7, Property Services Regulatory Authority 2, Dublinked 2, 3D Data Hack Dublin 2, NUI Maynooth AIRO 1, Local Government Management Agency 1, Dublin Region Flooding Data 1, Dublin City BID 1, Department of Education and Skills 1) — the basis for scale: regional. The licence split follows the publisher, not a policy: Fingal is 408/412 CC-BY-4.0, while Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown is 109/109 unversioned cc-by and Dublin City Council 158/159. Newest metadata_modified per council on 7 August 2026: Fingal 2026-08-07, South Dublin 2026-08-05, Dublin City Council 2026-07-31, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown 2026-04-15 — the currency check that rules out 'defunct but claimed live'. status_show reports CKAN 2.9.14 with a 'dublinked' extension, confirming this domain is the Dublinked platform.

↗ Dublinked — Statistics (the portal's own compliance dashboard)Read 7 August 2026. The operator publishes its own shortfalls, which is where the counterweight comes from. July 2026 row: 'Datasets Under Open Licence' 927 of 929 — the two CC BY-NC sets are correctly not counted as open — 'Broken Resource Links' 59, and 'Datasets with APIs' 5, flat since March. Per authority for July 2026: Dublin City Council 159 datasets, 0 added, 35 broken links, with its total falling 165 to 159 across March-July and only one dataset added in those five months; South Dublin 231 datasets, 8 broken; Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown 109 datasets, 0 added in five months, 7 broken; Fingal 412 datasets, 7 broken. Harvesters listed as last run 7 August 2026: 'Fingal Open Data ArcGIS' (410 datasets, 04:15) and 'sdcc-arcgis-sites' (226 datasets, 10:00) — the mechanism behind the licence coverage. The 'Website & Usage Metrics' table lists Visitors, Sessions, Avg. Session Duration, Avg. Page Load Time and Exit Rate with every cell blank for all five months, which is why the vendor's '30,000 users per year' claim is not used in this entry.

↗ Silicon Republic — Innovators called on to capitalise on 100 public datasetsDated 4 November 2011, the launch report. Names the founding partners: 'Dublin City Council and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown, South Dublin and Fingal County Councils'; states 'The information is curated by NUI Maynooth to ensure ideas can be commercialised as easily as possible and to minimise legal or technical barriers'; and that 'IBM Research has offered a technology platform using open-data collaboration technologies and research tools' to enable the start-up phase. Initial release: 'more than 100 environmental, traffic and planning datasets'. The article states no licence terms — the licensing question the atlas cares about was not settled at launch.

↗ Smart Dublin — Dublin's Open Data Platform: DublinkedOperator page, dated 25 February 2016. Dates the CKAN relaunch: 'Relaunched in 2016, packing 234 datasets, and designed with the needs of developers, researchers, public agencies, and active citizens in mind'. Confirms the governance: 'The four Dublin Authorities got together to share data about the region in one online platform.' Also the source of the stale claim quoted in the lesson: 'The "Right Now In Dublin" area is powered by Dublin Dashboard and shows live data about noise, pollution, parking, traffic and property prices' — dublindashboard.ie now redirects to https://dashboards.maynoothuniversity.ie/exhibition/ (observed 7 August 2026; the exhibition page itself returned 503 to this desk, so no claim is made about its contents beyond the redirect target). The page's marketing flourish comparing the data volume to the Apollo programme is deliberately not used.

↗ Smart Dublin data portal wiki — Licensing and sharing dataThe licence policy, and it is a recommendation rather than a rule: 'The vast majority of Dublinked data is licensed under either CC-BY-4.0 or CC-BY so please consider these licences first.' No version is mandated, no publishing duty is imposed and no compliance reporting is named — which is why the entry credits the harvesters, not the policy, for the 929/929 coverage. Separately, content produced by Smart Dublin itself is under CC BY-SA 3.0, requiring attribution and share-alike.

↗ data.gov.ie — SmartDublin harvest source (national portal)Resolves the 'has Dublinked been absorbed into the national portal?' question, and the answer is the reverse. The harvest source record on Ireland's national portal reads title 'SmartDublin', url 'https://data.smartdublin.ie', source_type 'dgidublinkedckan', frequency 'DAILY', state 'active', and reports 924 datasets collected. Verified by counting data.gov.ie itself on 7 August 2026: Fingal 413, South Dublin 233, Dublin City Council 161, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown 114 — mirroring Dublinked's 412/231/159/109 with harvest lag, under each council's own organisation. Dublinked is upstream of the national catalogue of 22,605 datasets, not replaced by it.

↗ Open Definition — Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY)The page 488 Dublinked datasets point to as their licence_url. It is version-agnostic: it describes CC BY generically ('allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited') and links to versions 1.0 through 4.0, advising publishers to state 'This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution [version number] License' — the version number Dublinked's metadata does not supply. This is the evidence for the entry's central claim that full coverage is not the same as a legible licence.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇨🇦 Montreal Open Data Portal & Digital Data Charter · Montreal Both license every dataset. Montreal's 405 carry the unmodified CC BY 4.0 deed; Dublin's 929 name a licence with no single version. 🇨🇦 Toronto Open Data: CKAN portal under a bespoke municipal licence · Toronto Toronto wrote a precise deed and names it on 115 of 554 datasets; Dublin names one on all 929, but 488 of them omit the version. 🇨🇭 Open Data Zürich: CC0 Government Data Catalogue · Zürich The clean end of the ladder: Zurich licenses 937/937, 97% CC0 with a deed URL. Dublin also hits 929/929 — with no deed behind 411 of them.

Explore the wider context

🗺️ Your City's Problem Map Is Really a Map of Who Complains 📊 Open data guide 🏙️ Dublin city profile 📡 Data & IoT projects 📖 Open data 📖 Urban data platform (UDP)📖 Building performance standard (BPS)

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Dublinked: the Dublin Region's open data platform” — Dublin, Ireland. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/dublin-dublinked-open-data/ (last verified 2026-08-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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