Frequently asked questions

What is the Open Data project?

The mission of the Luxembourg government's Open Data project is to support the opening of public data of the State and administrations. As such, it implements and runs the open public data platform data.public.lu, which hosts datasets and registers their re-use.

What is open data?

Open data is digital data that is made available to everyone to be easily reused for any purpose. It can therefore contribute to applications, studies, statistics, articles, graphs, dashboards of all kinds, which are of added value for the citizen.

What is the purpose of open data?

Open Data aims to encourage the re-use of data beyond its primary use by the administration. By using, directly or via applications, data published on the data.public.lu platform, one can for example:

• answer questions,
• make decisions for yourself, your municipality, your association or your company,
• benefit from useful everyday services: to get around, to avoid food waste, to know the public services near your home,
• To encourage the democratic transparency of institutions and elected representatives, for example: to know how the parliamentary reserve is used, the budgets of the State and local authorities, the press titles supported by the State.

Who is the data.public.lu website intended for?

• Data producers who wish to publish their data in open and reusable formats,
• to reusers who can reference their work, whether it is an article, a data visualisation or an application,
• but also to any citizen, association or company, who can discover and use data.

I need data that I cannot find on your portal - what should I do?

Please check first with the search function of the portal if these data are not available. In this case please write an email to the portal management team at info@data.public.lu and describe the data you need as well as possible. We will take care of searching for this data and obtaining it if possible. Please refer to our public data re-use request page for more information.

I have found errors in downloaded datasets - how do I approach the producer of the data?

The best way is to use the comment function at the bottom of each dataset page. This way your question and the subsequent answers or exchanges will be visible to the community and will also benefit others.

The data I'm interested in is not available in a format that suits me - what can I do?

You can use the comment function at the bottom of each dataset page to see if the producer of the data can provide the data also in the desired format. Eventually you can get help or instructions from the community on how to proceed with the available formats.

I create data myself, can I also publish it on your portal? OR is the portal only for administrations?

Yes, you and your data are welcome. You can publish them and contribute to the Luxembourg open data ecosystem. However, don't forget to assign an open license to it, we recommend for any further reuse facility to use the Creative Commons Zero (public domain).

What is the impact of open data on Luxembourg and the Greater Region?

We review all these points on the page Impact of Open data - definitions and reflections in the framework of the Luxembourgish Open data project.

How to become part of the data.public.lu community?

If you create original data, you can publish your own datasets.
If you have processed data from a dataset, you can republish the results of your processing as a community resource on that dataset. If it involves a reuse of the data, feel free to publish it as a reuse.
For all these activities, you simply need to create a user account on data.public.lu.

By consulting the portal blog you can register for the various events (Hackathons, conferences) organised.

We also invite you to follow our social networks accounts, as listed on the footer of this website.

The platform team can also be reached by email: info@data.public.lu.

What is a dataset?

A dataset is a set of data that has been given a name, a description, and a set of metadata, such as the last publication date, the frequency of publication, and the license. You can consult our guidelines for publishing open data (https://data.public.lu/en/pages/publishing/) and our fact sheet entitled "Quality Publication of Datasets" (https://data.public.lu/en/pages/fact-sheets/data-quality/).

What is a reuse?

There is no strict definition of the concept.
A broad definition is that reuse refers to the use of public data by third parties for purposes other than the public service mission for which the data was produced or received.
However, there are more restrictive approaches. For example, some consider only long-term uses of data to be reuse, while others consider any use of data to be reuse.
Reuse commonly refers to the exploitation of open data. It can take the form of a visualization, an application, a press article, a research paper, etc.

What is an organization?

When you publish data on data.public.lu, you do so in your own name by default.
We recommend creating an organization or joining an existing one if you wish to:

• publish datasets on behalf of a public or private organization (administration, local authority, association, company, etc.);
• allow different users to publish and modify datasets under the same name and banner.