Observatorio Santiago: One Comuna's Geodata, and a City Without a Catalogue
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.
Counted from the operator's ArcGIS REST API on 26 July 2026: the IMS_Observatorio account holds 411 items, of which 136 are public feature services. Only 28 of those 136 carry any licence statement at all and 108 carry none; not one names a recognised licence. Twenty-four of the 28 carry the same free text, which states that the information is referential and illustrative, under permanent revision, and that any use in an analysis, document, report or presentation must cite the Ilustre Municipalidad de Santiago — an obligation on the reuser with no corresponding grant. Twenty-three of the 136 name a source in a separate credits field. Counted the same day from the CKAN API of the national portal datos.gob.cl: 3,149 datasets from 231 publishing organisations, of which 1,313 are Creative Commons Non-Commercial, 922 CC BY, 421 CC0, 352 ODC-PDDL, 52 ODC-BY, 50 ODbL and 23 explicitly unspecified. The non-commercial share is 41.7 percent. The Gobierno Regional Metropolitano de Santiago accounts for two of the 3,149, both entitled Licitaciones, both created on 30 October 2015, both non-commercial; Metro de Santiago publishes six and the Parque Metropolitano eight.
🎓 Lesson
A non-commercial licence on a public dataset is a refusal dressed as a grant, and it is Chile's most common one. Underneath it, a metropolis of six and a half million has no catalogue of its own — only one comuna's map shop, where four fifths of the layers say nothing about reuse and the rest ask for credit without giving permission.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏘️ District
Sources
↗ ArcGIS search API — public feature services owned by IMS_Observatorio (operator, primary count)Queried 26 July 2026 with full pagination, all 136 records retrieved rather than sampled. Of the 136, 28 carry a licenseInfo string and 108 carry none; none matches any recognised licence name — no Creative Commons deed, no Open Data Commons instrument, no public-domain dedication. Twenty-four of the 28 share one identical text; the remaining four are cartographic provenance notes about census boundaries, not licences. Twenty-three records carry an accessInformation credit naming the Municipality or the national statistics institute.
↗ ArcGIS item metadata — Monumentos Historicos, Comuna de Santiago (operator, primary)The sentence-level source for the licence finding. Its licenseInfo states the information is referential and illustrative, in permanent revision and updating, and that on using it for any analysis in a document, report or presentation the user must cite the Ilustre Municipalidad de Santiago as the entity that produced the map. Confirms owner IMS_Observatorio and organisation 047d5de1bff2445cabb9a9c94d75d1f9.
↗ ArcGIS search API — all IMS_Observatorio items sorted by creation date (operator, primary)Basis for the dates and the 411 total. The earliest items are dated 2 November 2023 — the comunal boundary and census boundary layers. A separate query of the community user record gives the account creation as 13 September 2023, and a query restricted to Hub Site Applications shows the public download catalogue was created on 9 October 2024, with a duplicate site on 20 March 2025. yearStart is set to 2023 on the first published layers, not on the later public front end.
↗ Observatorio Santiago — public download catalogue (operator)The public front end for the layers counted above. Fetched 26 July 2026 and returned an almost empty body: ArcGIS Hub renders client-side, so no licence or dataset information is readable without JavaScript, which is why every count in this entry was taken from the platform APIs instead.
↗ datos.gob.cl — CKAN package_search with licence facet (national portal, primary count)Queried 26 July 2026. Total 3,149 datasets. Licence facet in full: cc-nc 1,313, cc-by 922, cc-zero 421, odc-pddl 352, odc-by 52, odc-odbl 50, notspecified 23, other-open 4, gfdl 2, other-pd 1 — leaving nine datasets the facet does not account for. FETCH NOTE: this endpoint answers curl but returned HTTP 503 to other clients on the same day, so a reader reproducing the count may need to retry.
↗ datos.gob.cl — a Creative Commons Non-Commercial dataset record (national portal)Confirms the facet label is not a cataloguing artefact: the records carry license_title 'Creative Commons Non-Commercial (Any)' and license_url pointing at the CC BY-NC 2.0 deed. Sampled records come from the Ministry of Health and the Regional Government of Aysen, so the non-commercial default is not confined to one publisher.
↗ datos.gob.cl — datasets published by the Gobierno Regional Metropolitano de Santiago (national portal)The count that carries the entry's central absence: the regional government of Gran Santiago has published two datasets, both titled Licitaciones, both with metadata created on 30 October 2015, both under the non-commercial licence. A parallel organisation facet query returns 231 publishing organisations in total, among them Metro de Santiago with six datasets, the Parque Metropolitano de Santiago with eight and the Subsecretaria de Transporte with six.
↗ Open Definition — conformant licencesCited only for the standard the entry measures against: the Open Definition's conformant list includes CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC0, PDDL, ODC-BY and ODbL, and excludes non-commercial licences. This is what makes the 1,313 non-commercial datasets a substantive finding rather than a labelling quibble.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Observatorio Santiago: One Comuna's Geodata, and a City Without a Catalogue” — Santiago, Chile. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/santiago-observatorio-geodata/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
