PUTRAJAYA, Jan 12 — The Department of Statistics Malaysia (DoSM) officially launched an open data platform called OpenDOSM Next Gen today.
Chief Statistician Datuk Seri Mohd Uzir Mahidi said the platform is in line with the agency’s efforts to innovate and encourage proper and accurate dissemination of data for public use.
"The world is full of data, and the flooding of data increases the demand for reliable statistics and information in making decisions. As the country’s official statistics department, we are faced with high expectations to deliver real-time and reliable data.
"Open data not only enables the people to make more accurate decisions but more importantly, it empowers the people to contribute to good policy development,” he said at the launch here.
Minister of Economy Rafizi Ramli, who officiated the launch, said the portal is a huge improvement to current standards of data-sharing in the country and he hopes that it would encourage different agencies to be more transparent with their data.
"We want to encourage data sharing between the agencies and departments to give it more value not just for government-related work but also to make it much more valuable for everyone else.
"Because if that much data is only limited to the government, it does not help our efforts of promoting data and digitalisation to our society," he said at the launch.
Rafizi said he hopes the open data platform clearly signals the government's commitment to transparency.
"This is a signal that is as important as the features [of OpenDOSM]. Going forward, I think we are moving towards an open government and open data. So the sooner and faster we can utilise OpenDOSM to get more features, more details, and more data. Hopefully, that builds confidence in the government's data integrity.
"Data is the way forward. This is a necessity for the future and we are committed to fully sprint ahead with digitalisation and open source data and data sharing,” he said.
All data sets found on OpenDOSM are freely available for download either as raw datasets, tables or charts. They can also be scraped using the Python programming language.
Among the data made available so far are the unemployment rate, exchange rates, Consumer Price Index, Gross Domestic Product, voting statistics, and on Covid-19.
The platform can be accessed at https://open.dosm.gov.my.
