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The initial step in selecting open datasets to use is finding which datasets are available.

Open data are available from different kinds of sources, including government agencies, municipalities, companies, other organizations, and from crowd-sourcing.

Where to start looking

A good starting point to locate datasets is in open data catalogues and portals. Note that datasets can be registered in more than one catalogue, and the catalogues also harvest data from each other. Thus, there is substantial overlap in the catalogues mentioned above.

Norwegain portals

In Norway, the following catalogues and portals are good soures:

Norwegian municipalities

Open data from Norwegian municipalities can be found in various catalogues, such as portals provided by the municipalities themselves, the Geonorge portal and Felles datakatalog. The following table gives some examples from the ten largest municipalities in Norway.

Municipality Geonorge Felles datakatalog Other portals
Oslo Map data Felles datakatalog Own portal
Bergen Map data Felles datakatalog
Trondheim Map data Felles datakatalog Own portal, Other
Stavanger Map data Felles datakatalog Own portal
Bærum Map data Other
Kristiansand Map data
Fredrikstad Map data Felles datakatalog Smart Fredrikstad
Sandnes Map data
Tromsø Map data Felles datakatalog Tromsø kommune åpne kartdata
Drammen Map data

Norwegian goverment agencies, etc.

Data from Norwegian government agencies:

Other sources:

International sources

Finding data elsewhere

Unfortunately, the catalogues do not cover all available data. If you do not find a specific data set, it can still be worth to search for the data in other ways, e.g by:

  • visiting the web pages and/or contacting the organization you are looking for data from
  • trying Google’s beta-version of a service for finding datasets: Google Dataset Search. In this you can find data from many catalogs, and through the data also discover catalogs in which they are registered.
  • trying regular Google searches

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