Washington D.C.'s open data policy, ArcGIS Hub portal and licence

🤖 AI-generated summary · 🔎 Last verified 2026-07-26

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 · What “source-checked” means

The District dedicates its data to the public domain in writing, while most files ship under an attribution licence. Of 1,061 datasets its agencies called open in 2024, 298 were not published.

Outcome🔄 Ongoing

Evidence🏛️ Official

what does this mean?

The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →

Run byOffice of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), Government of the District of Columbia

Scale🏙️ City-wide

Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 9 more in Washington D.C. · 📊 Open data guide · 📡 Data & IoT projects

A 2014 mayor's order told District agencies to publish their datasets to a central catalogue; Mayor's Order 2017-115 added a Data Policy in 2017 that makes every agency inventory its data and grade each set from level 0 (open) to level 4 (restricted confidential). The portal, opendata.dc.gov, runs on Esri's ArcGIS Hub and serves a DCAT-US feed. The District's terms of use dedicate its data to the public domain under CC0 1.0 — but the catalogue's own metadata mostly ships CC BY 4.0, and some datasets carry 'custom', 'null' or no licence at all.

Live 📅 since 2014

📊 Impact

The first enterprise dataset inventory (March 2018) covered 1,640 datasets at 79 agencies, 708 of them (43.2%) classified level 0 open. By the 2024 annual report, 78 agencies listed 2,330 datasets and 1,061 were classified open — of which 298 (28%) were still not published.

🎓 Lesson

Read the metadata, not the policy page. D.C. dedicates its data to the public domain in writing, while most of the files ship under an attribution licence — and a quarter of the sets its own agencies call open are not online.

📡 Data & IoT Open data Digital government GIS & cadastre

Sources

↗ OCTO — District of Columbia Data PolicyNames the instrument: 'Mayor's Order 2017-115', effective 'April 27, 2017' and amended 'June 19, 2018'. Links onward to the full policy at opendata.dc.gov/pages/data-policy.

↗ Mayor's Order 2014-170 — Transparency, Open Government and Open Data DirectiveThe earlier instrument (July 2014): each agency to make available through the online District of Columbia Data Catalog all appropriate datasets and metadata, machine-readable, by 1 November 2014. Confirmed via search index; the document page itself was not retrieved, and no source found says the 2017 order rescinds it.

↗ OCTO — release of the Enterprise Dataset Inventory and CDO Annual Report (12 March 2018)'79 agencies recorded 1,640 enterprise datasets, nearly 80 percent of the 99 agencies that were asked to participate.' Level 0 (open) = 708 datasets, 43.2 percent; level 4 (restricted confidential) = 94 datasets, 5.7 percent.

↗ Government of the District of Columbia — Terms and Conditions of Use for District Data archived copyThe written licence: 'Unless otherwise noted, the data on the Sites is public domain and made available with a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal dedication', under which 'the District waives all rights to the data worldwide under copyright law'. District logos are excluded; credit ('Data retrieved from Open Data DC catalog') is requested, not required.

↗ Open Data DC — ArcGIS Hub datasets API (org 'City of Washington, DC')The shipped licence, read from metadata rather than policy. A ten-dataset sample returned CC-BY-4.0 for six (incl. 'Roadway SubBlock Intersection', 'Floodplain 100 Year', 'DC Estimated Trees'), 'custom' for three, and CC0-1.0 for one ('Racial Equity Dashboard'). The API answering for this org id is also what confirms the portal runs on Esri's ArcGIS Hub.

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↗ Open Data DC — DCAT-US 1.1 catalogue feedMachine-readable catalogue. Most entries carry ''license': 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0''; 'Washington, DC: A University District' carries an empty string and 'Automated Safety Camera Program' the literal string 'null'. accessLevel is 'public' throughout; there is no 'rights' field.

↗ D.C. Open Government Coalition — Open DataIndependent compliance reading of the CDO's own annual reporting: 'Agencies reported in 2023 that they hold 1,061 datasets assessed as Level 0 in sensitivity' and '298 datasets or 28 per cent of the 1,061 total classified as open are not yet published for public access'; '78 D.C. Government agencies recorded 2,330 enterprise datasets'. Also records Mayor's Order 2018-050 directing the Chief Data Officer to report annually each March.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇺🇸 City of Miami Open Data: A Live GIS Hub and a Stalled Portal · Miami Miami is the mirror image: no policy page at all, yet its GIS hub ships a CC BY 4.0 deed in almost every dataset's metadata. 🇨🇦 Toronto Open Data: CKAN portal under a bespoke municipal licence · Toronto Toronto wrote its own municipal deed instead of borrowing CC0 or CC BY — clear terms, named in only 115 of its 554 datasets. 🇨🇦 Montreal Open Data Portal & Digital Data Charter · Montreal Montreal is the case where policy and metadata agree: a council resolution adopted CC BY 4.0 in 2014, and every record names it.

Explore the wider context

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📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Washington D.C.'s open data policy, ArcGIS Hub portal and licence” — Washington D.C., United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/washington-dc-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.

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