Data Catalogs
How open data portals, geoportals and repositories work, and how to choose your own
Ivan Begtin
Open data, data engineering and digital preservation
I build services that help people find and use public data, and I write about how governments and science publish it.
I am the founder and CTO of Dateno, a search engine for datasets, the founder and director of the Infoculture NGO, and a co-founder of Open Data Armenia.
In numbers
- the year I started working on open data and open government
- 2009
- datasets from 5,236 sources indexed by Dateno
- 22M
- data catalogs described in the open registry
- 43,614
- subscribers of the Telegram channel
- 9.1K
As of October 2026.
Books
All booksWhat I work on
All projectsDateno
A search engine for datasets. It learns each catalog's platform and API addresses from the registry of data catalogs and collects dataset descriptions through them: 22 million datasets from 5,236 sources as of October 2026.
Registry of data catalogs
An open registry of data catalogs of the whole world, started as Common Data Index: 43,614 catalogs and 790 platforms in release 1.27.0 of October 2026.
Infoculture
Informational Culture, a non-profit for open government and open data. Founded in March 2012 by the founders of the Apps4Russia contest. Runs open databases, the National Digital Archive and Open Data Day in Moscow.
Open Data Armenia
A community project that collects and publishes open data about Armenia.
National Digital Archive
Saves websites, Telegram channels and open data at risk of disappearing, mostly government ones, and makes the archives open. Archived open data portals in 2022 and the Rosstat and EMISS statistics sites in 2025.
Public spending portal
spending.gov.ru: contracts, subsidies and national project spending, released as open data and through an API. A team of six built it in four and a half months; it launched in November 2019.
Contact
Write to ivan@begtin.tech or message me on Telegram. Corrections to the books are welcome by email, on Telegram or as GitHub issues.