After more than an year of its announcement, looks like the Indian government has finally launched data.gov.in (hat-tip - @paraschopra ) in open beta. The site allows the Government of India Ministries/ Departments and their organizations to publish data-sets, documents, services, tools and applications collected by them for public use, in order to make government functions more transparent. As we reported earlier, the portal is a joint initiative of Government of India and US Government, and will be on the lines of the US government's open data initiative, data.gov. The US team of the General Services Administration developed the Data Management System module and India team of the National Informatics Centre developed the Website, its Content Management System and the Visitor Relation Management module. The two teams had launched the Open Government Platform (OGPL), an open source version of the US’s Data.gov platform, in March. We had reported that the data.gov.in site was in closed beta, at that point in time. Accessibility: The website claims to have been tested for compliance with WCAG 2.0 Level AA and Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW) using a technical standards check-list, testing with screen readers, policy experts, and person with disabilities. The Data.gov.in platform will offer a module for contributing data catalogs by various government agencies for making it available on the front end website after a due approval process through a defined workflow. It will also have a Module for managing and updating various functionalities and content types of the National Data Portal frontend, and a module for collating and disseminating viewer feedback on various data…
