Observatorio Santiago: One Comuna's Geodata, and a City Without a Catalogue

A metropolis of six and a half million has no data catalogue; one comuna runs a map shop instead. Of its 136 public layers, 108 carry no licence, and the 28 that speak demand a citation while granting nothing.

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Gran Santiago has no open-data catalogue, because it has no government that could run one. The Ilustre Municipalidad de Santiago — the historic core, one comuna of the thirty-two in the province — publishes Observatorio Santiago, an ArcGIS Hub of census blocks, neighbourhood units, municipal schools and clinics, police stations and fire companies, monuments, conservation zones and a noise map. The account went up in September 2023, the first layers that November, the public download site in October 2024. Above it there is almost nothing: the Metropolitan Regional Government's entire contribution to Chile's national portal is two datasets of tender notices, uploaded in October 2015. Chile centralises, so the transport directorate DTPM and Metro de Santiago appear there as rows in someone else's catalogue rather than as catalogue operators. And the national portal has a licence problem of its own: its single largest class is Creative Commons Non-Commercial, which the Open Definition does not count as open at all. The comuna's own layers are looser still — four in five declare no licence, and none names one. Where a layer does speak, it demands a citation while granting nothing in return.