Event Data.Gov.in

Report on the Workshop on “Tamil Nadu Open Government Data (TNOGD) portal for the officials of Department of Economics and Statistics” held on 12th September 2019 at Grand by GRT Hotel, Chennai.

Dr Santhosh Babu I.A.S., Principal Secretary to Government, Information Technology Department, has inaugurated the workshop on the TNOGD for the officials of Department of Economics and Statistics (DES).

The following officers have graced the occasion and delivered the special addresses with their valuable points on Open Government Data:

• Managing Director, ELCOT
• Commissioner, Department of Economics and Statistics
• Chief Executive Officer & Commissioner, TNeGA
• Director, CDAC, Chennai
• Deputy Director General, NIC Hqrs, New Delhi.
• State Informatics Officer, NIC, Chennai

Ms N.Shanthi, Manager, e-Governance division, ELCOT has welcomed the gathering.

Smt Alka Misra DDG, NIC Hqrs, Delhi explained about the initiatives of OGD by Government of India, its objectives, usage, etc and how OGD portal for Tamil Nadu State has been created as SaaS (Software as a Service) instance. She also added that, the open data is machine readable data that can be freely used, reused, redistributed by anyone. Every citizen, entrepreneur, startup will be able to make use of the open data.

Mrs Bhuvaneswari, Deputy Manager-II, ELCOT, has presented the progress of TNOGD covering various activities to implement OGD in TN State and its usefulness to its stakeholders namely Researchers, Academicians, Citizen and Government Departments, etc.

Thiru Vijayakumar, I.A.S., Managing Director, ELCOT, has graced the occasion with his presence and extended full support in organizing this event. He also added that both hardware and software are very important in any IT implementation, and emphasized about the importance of the training.

Cdr Prakash, Director, CDAC, in his special address stated that domain knowledge is important while using big data tools & techniques. He insisted that data should be used in the right way and right analytics will benefit citizens.

Sri Srinivasa Raghavan, SIO & DDG, NIC Chennai has stated that TNOGD has large amount of data and has large number of downloads and this portal will act as a role model to other states.

Thiru Santhosh K Misra, I.A.S., enlightened the participants with his speech and made them understood about the importance of sharing the sharable data. He also added that, the data should be cleansed, readable, granular and should be useful in machine learning. He advised to modify the portal name as data.tn.gov.in.

Dr. Atul Anand, I.A.S., Commissioner, Department of Economics and Statistics stated in his address that Government Departments generate a lot of data during their functioning and implementation of various developmental schemes. These data are very much useful for governance, learning and awareness. He added that data put in the portal could be downloaded, digitally transferred and used for developing apps for further use.

Dr Santhosh Babu I.A.S., in his inaugural address has indicated that data is the most valuable resource for the present generation. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Digital Learning are emerging as effective methods for the present and the future. He expressed that the statistical data has to be treated as a “Gold Mine”. He explained about the importance of the Data Driven Governance, Granularity and Block Chain.

During the Workshop, IT Secretary, has released the TNOGD Brochure which provides the salient features of the TNOGD portal.

Mr Kamalakkannan, Senior Technical Director, NIC, Chennai has briefly explained about data sharing policy and its implementation guidelines.

Mr Sunil Babbar, Technical Director, NIC Hqrs, Delhi has explained about the process and procedure in publishing of datasets in the portal, purpose of metadata and data quality. He explained the way of contribution and consumption of datasets.

During the second half of the workshop, Mr. Vijayakumar, Joint Director, CDAC, Chennai has presented the analytical reports based on datasets.

Mrs Bhuvaneswari, has presented the live demo of the TNOGD portal.

Sri Akhilesh Kumar Srivatsava, Senior Technical Project Manager, NIC Hqrs, Delhi briefly explained about the creation of visualization, blogs and Info-graphics. He briefly talked about, the creation of different types of charts using the tool Visualization Engine of the TNOGD portal.

Round table discussion was conducted by Smt Alka Misra, DDG NIC Hqrs, Mr Manivannan, Technical Consultant, ELCOT and Mrs. Hemalatha, Joint Director, DES and they have clarified various queries raised by the participants. The Participants have also been asked to promote the TNOGD portal down the level as necessary and the data for the year 2018 at the Districts, Corporation and Municipal levels, have to be submitted by each district officer on or before 30th September 2019 by mail.

Mrs. Bhuvaneswari has proposed the vote of thanks.

In this one day workshop, 100 officials from Department of Economics and Statistics, ELCOT, NIC and CDAC have participated.

This workshop was successfully ended with National Anthem sung by all.