Object Technology Solutions India Pvt. ltd (OTSI), which developed NITI Aayog’s National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP), said it will integrate more datasets into the platform in the coming weeks.
The platform, developed with input from NITI Aayog, was unveiled last week.
It aims to standardize data across sources and provide flexible analytics that make it easier for users to analyze information with multiple datasets, the company said.
The portal will help citizens, policy makers, academics, researchers, institutions and international organizations to easily analyze data across departments by seamlessly merging disparate datasets.
It currently offers 203 datasets from more than 47 central government departments and agencies and from 14 sectors. It will add new records down to the village level in the future.
The datasets available on the portal were selected based on use cases and after discussion with experts about the most commonly used data needed for various analyses, the company said.
For example, data from the census, the National Family Health Survey and the Unified District Information System for Education are available on the portal.
While many government agencies today have public dashboards with options to download data, some are available as image files while others are in PDF format, making it difficult to compile information.
“The cross-departmental analysis of data is another key challenge. The data collected by different government agencies are inconsistent due to different standards for common indicators. This issue has been addressed in NDAP,” the company said.
The portal has also implemented an algorithm to track changes in data published on different departments’ websites and re-process the newly available data with minimal manual intervention in the NDAP platform, it said.
“Using specially designed algorithms, the data retrieved from different government portals is processed to ensure consistent semantics so that two different datasets can be compared,” said Chandra Talluri, chief executive officer of OTSI, in a statement.
“This means our software enables government data to be presented in a user-friendly format and encourages data-driven decision-making and research. To date, we have analyzed and processed more than 30,000 source files from different departments and combined them into 203 records on NDAP,” he said.
“We have taken every measure to ensure that NDAP’s backend architecture is scalable and resilient to meet India’s future needs,” he said.
