São Paulo Open Data Portal and Municipal Data Policy
The city's CKAN portal, run by the municipal comptroller's integrity unit, held 474 datasets on 26 July 2026, and 454 of them had been touched within the past year. There is no municipal licence: each publishing body picks from CKAN's stock dropdown, so the catalogue splits across ten licences, led by CC0 (277 datasets) and CC BY (148). Every record declares something, which is rare, but six carry a non-commercial Creative Commons licence that fails the city's own statutory definition of open data. Open Knowledge Brasil ranked São Paulo first among 26 Brazilian capitals in 2023, at 48%.
First of 26 Brazilian state capitals in Open Knowledge Brasil's Índice de Dados Abertos para Cidades 2023, scoring 48%; the index reports that no capital reached 50% and only São Paulo and Belo Horizonte reached a 'medium' level of openness.
🎓 Lesson
Full licence coverage is not the same as a licence policy. São Paulo declares a licence on all 474 datasets, a completeness no other catalogue in this series has matched, yet because each department chooses its own, six datasets sit on the open data portal under a non-commercial licence that the city's own law does not accept as open.
Evidence📊 Independent
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Sources
↗ Portal de Dados Abertos da Cidade de São Paulo, CKAN API (licence facet)Queried through the CKAN API rather than the website, on 26 July 2026. Returns 'count: 474' and a license_id facet summing to exactly 474: cc-zero 277, cc-by 148, cc-by-sa 16, odc-pddl 9, other-open 7, cc-nc 6, odc-odbl 5, odc-by 3, other-pd 2, notspecified 1. No dataset lacks a licence field. A second call with fq=metadata_modified:[2025-07-26T00:00:00Z TO NOW] returns 454; sorting by metadata_modified desc gives 'EQUIPAMENTOS DE SEGURANÇA URBANA' at 2026-07-23, licence cc-by. Sorting by metadata_created asc gives the oldest record, 'Plano Plurianual — PPA', created 2015-12-04. Caveat: metadata_modified records any metadata edit, not necessarily a data refresh.
↗ About the portal, Prefeitura de São Paulo'Organizado pela Coordenadoria de Promoção da Integridade (COPI) da Controladoria Geral do Município (CGM-SP)' ('Organised by the Integrity Promotion Coordination Office of the Municipal Comptroller General'). Cites Decreto Municipal 54.779/2014 and Decreto Municipal 63.463/2024, and names CKAN as the platform. The page states no licence or terms of use, and links no policy: there is no municipal deed behind the per-dataset licences.
↗ Lei Municipal 17.901 de 11 de janeiro de 2023 (Política Municipal de Dados Abertos e Transparência Ativa)Art. 3 VI defines open data as 'dados acessíveis ao público ... disponibilizados sob licença aberta' ('data accessible to the public ... made available under an open licence'). Art. 3 XVII defines free licences as 'modo de autorização que garante a liberdade de cópia, compartilhamento, modificação e realização de trabalhos derivados dos dados abertos sob essa licença' ('a form of authorisation guaranteeing the freedom to copy, share, modify and make derivative works'). Art. 4 V requires 'publicação com a maior frequência possível e o mais próximo possível de sua produção' ('publication as frequently as possible and as close as possible to the moment of production'). Mirrored here because legislacao.prefeitura.sp.gov.br and leismunicipais.com.br refused automated retrieval (CAPTCHA and 403).
↗ Decreto 63.463 de 29 de maio de 2024 (Planos Setoriais de Transparência e Dados Abertos)Title of the decree: 'Cria os Planos Setoriais de Transparência e Dados Abertos, bem como regulamenta a Lei nº 17.901, de 11 de janeiro de 2023, e dispositivos da Lei Federal nº 12.527, de 18 de novembro de 2011' ('Creates the Sectoral Transparency and Open Data Plans, and regulates Law 17.901/2023 and provisions of Federal Law 12.527/2011'). Establishes that the federal access-to-information law and the municipal policy bind departments through a per-department published plan.
↗ Portal de Dados Abertos: origin in the Catálogo Municipal de Bases de Dados, CGM-SPThe portal grew out of the Catálogo Municipal de Bases de Dados, provided for by Decreto 54.779/2014, which lists every database produced by municipal bodies; 591 databases were catalogued, with data dictionaries and metadata. CKAN was customised for the city by Prodam. This is the city's data inventory, and it is separate from the published catalogue.
↗ Open Knowledge Brasil, Índice de Dados Abertos para CidadesIndependent civic-tech assessment of 26 state capitals, 11 indicators in six criteria groups, fieldwork July to October 2023. Reports that only São Paulo and Belo Horizonte reached a 'medium' level of openness and that no capital reached 50% of the score. Methodology note: https://ok.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Metodologia-ODI-2023_v3.pdf
↗ 'São Paulo é a capital com maior transparência de dados públicos do Brasil', Prefeitura de São PauloCarrying sentence for the figure: 'a cidade apresentou o maior índice de transparência entre as capitais, com 48%' ('the city showed the highest transparency index among the capitals, at 48%'), and 'a Prefeitura de São Paulo é a que apresentou maior quantidade de dados publicados' ('São Paulo City Hall published the largest quantity of data'). Note the attribution: the index is Open Knowledge Brasil's, but this exact 48% sentence is the city relaying its own result.
↗ Indicador de Dados Abertos, second half of 2025, reported by ConaciSemiannual compliance indicator created by CGM-SP in 2025 under Lei 17.901/2023, covering '75 órgãos e entidades da Administração Pública Municipal', measured 24 November to 12 December 2025 and published 4 March 2026. '71% das instituições alcançaram nota superior a 5' ('71% of institutions scored above 5'), leaving roughly 29% below. Half the score is governance (training, updating the CMBD, filing a sectoral plan) and half is portal maturity. CGM-SP, which both runs the portal and calculates the indicator, awarded itself 10.00, so the top grade is not treated here as an achievement. The city's own transparency portal pages on the indicator could not be retrieved directly (Prodam CAPTCHA).
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “São Paulo Open Data Portal and Municipal Data Policy” — São Paulo, Brazil. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/sao-paulo-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.
