Rio publishes its open data through data.rio, an Esri ArcGIS Hub site run by the Instituto Pereira Passos rather than a CKAN or Socrata catalogue. Decreto 38.474/2014 created the city's open-data system and the transparency portal quotes the Open Definition, but no article commanding an open licence could be located — the licence lives in the metadata, not in the law. Of 100 dataset records sampled from the city's Hub index, 76 carried CC BY 4.0 and 24 the value "custom"; a separate partial sample turned up records carrying no licence field at all. Open Knowledge Brasil's 2023 index of 26 Brazilian capitals put only five above its lowest band, São Paulo highest at 48%, and Rio was not among them.
The data.rio catalogue held 196 datasets when counted through its Hub API on 26 July 2026. Sorted by last modification, between 60 and 68 of those 196 had been touched in the previous twelve months; the median dataset was last modified in December 2023. In a 100-record sample of the city's Hub dataset index, 76 records carried CC-BY-4.0 and 24 carried "custom".
🎓 Lesson
A licence in the metadata is not a licence in the law. Rio ships CC BY 4.0 on most of its datasets without a decree article that requires one — the mirror image of Bogota, which wrote the rule and then broke it.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Sources
↗ DATA.RIO (portal)The portal itself. FETCH FAILURE flagged: the page returned only the string "DATA.RIO" to an automated fetch (JavaScript-rendered shell), so no count, licence statement or terms of use could be read from it. Everything counted below came from its Hub API instead.
↗ data.rio ArcGIS Hub search API — dataset collectionEstablishes the catalogue size: "numberMatched": 196, reproduced across four separate calls on 26 July 2026. Adding sortBy=-properties.modified, record 60 shows modified 1760383308000 (13 Oct 2025), record 69 shows 1750102612000 (16 Jun 2025) and record 98 shows 1703683249000 (27 Dec 2023) — placing the twelve-month cut-off between records 60 and 69, and the median in December 2023. Caveat: Hub 'modified' records item-metadata change, which is not strictly the same as a data refresh.
↗ ArcGIS Hub v3 dataset index, City of Rio org (orgId OlP4dGNtIcnD3RYf)Establishes the licence mix: of the 100 records returned, 76 carried "CC-BY-4.0" and 24 "custom", none missing. FETCH FAILURES flagged: filter[license]=… returned HTTP 500 and aggregations=license / aggregations=fields(license) returned HTTP 400, so no exact census of the catalogue's licences was possible and none is claimed. The endpoint's meta totalCount of 10,864 counts individual layers across the whole city ArcGIS organisation, not portal datasets, and is deliberately not used in the entry.
↗ data.rio predecessor Hub site — dataset collectionEstablishes that an older sibling catalogue is still served and returns "numberMatched": 207. A page of this collection, TRUNCATED by the fetcher at 30 of 100 requested records, contained 15 CC-BY-4.0, 10 "custom" and 5 records with no license field — the sole basis for the entry's statement that some records carry no licence at all. Because the page was truncated, it is reported as a sample and no count is drawn from it.
↗ Portal da Transparencia Rio — Dados AbertosEstablishes three things sentence-level: that the Instituto Pereira Passos maintains data.rio (while the Controladoria Geral do Municipio maintains Contas Rio); that the framework instruments are Decreto no 38.474 de 31 de marco de 2014, which instituted the Sistema Unificado de Dados e Governo Abertos, and Decreto RIO no 54.844 de 29 de julho de 2024, which regulates federal laws 14.129/2021 and 14.063/2020; and that the page defines open data by quoting the Open Definition — "Dados sao abertos quando qualquer pessoa pode livremente acesa-los, utiliza-los, modifica-los e compartilha-los para qualquer finalidade, estando sujeito, no maximo, a exigencias que visem preservar sua proveniencia e sua abertura". No article commanding an open licence appears on the page, which is why the entry claims none.
↗ Brasil 61 — ODI Cidades 2023 resultsEstablishes the independent counterweight: of the 26 Brazilian capitals assessed in Open Knowledge Brasil's Indice de Dados Abertos para Cidades 2023, only five cleared the lowest band — Sao Paulo 48%, Belo Horizonte 47%, Recife 38%, Curitiba 27%, Fortaleza 26%. Rio de Janeiro is not named among them, which is the entry's only claim about Rio's placing. FETCH FAILURES flagged: Rio's own percentage could not be retrieved because ok.org.br returned HTTP 403 and the Agencia Brasil report on the same index is disabled for electoral-law reasons. A search-layer summary claiming Rio scored zero in the Public Finance dimension was NOT verified sentence-level and is deliberately excluded.
↗ Escritorio de Dados da Cidade do Rio de JaneiroProvenance only, and NOT FETCHED — surfaced through search and listed so the editor knows it exists: Rio runs a second, newer data operation (the Escritorio de Dados, with a BigQuery data lake, plus an IPLANRIO data catalogue at data-catalog.iplan.dados.rio) alongside IPP's data.rio. The entry makes no claim resting on this source.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “data.rio: Rio de Janeiro's open-data portal” — Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/rio-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.
