Use of CBS open data has grown explosively

Statistics Netherlands (CBS) has improved the description and accessibility of its open data. The use of CBS open data has grown explosively in recent months. Although it has been only four years since CBS launched its open data portal, there were more than 12 million open data retrievals in the first two months of 2019 alone.

Number of retrievals of CBS open data per month
		Through CBS-website/StatLine	Through other applications
2016	1	0	108930
	2	0	172463
	3	0	264661
	4	358	85209
	5	422	120700
	6	208	160220
	7	211	121468
	8	162	218563
	9	635	112267
	10	8282	226389
	11	68368	138322
	12	95150	117440
2017	1	101980	189676
	2	49278	118166
	3	85601	238126
	4	73691	149699
	5	77148	357120
	6	77231	187208
	7	57903	259244
	8	59016	480712
	9	67601	574865
	10	68712	714579
	11	68579	362515
	12	133146	324363
2018	1	173163	415496
	2	208560	487709
	3	280386	553986
	4	264655	706258
	5	266887	837371
	6	257188	899705
	7	179942	817583
	8	209594	985666
	9	290387	1042887
	10	508039	1755782
	11	627769	3910631
	12	574649	3939521
2019	1	681159	5821627
2019	2	619654	4947031

There were more retrievals in January 2019 than in the whole of 2017. By far the most favoured types of data are district and neighbourhood information and proximity to facilities. Other open data used more extensively include population, household income and consumer prices. Users are increasingly able to find the more than 4,500 data sets, meaning strong growth in the number of unique users. More unique users means that more web applications have been created which make direct use of the open data.

Number of users CBS open data per month
		Through CBS-website/StatLine	Through other applications
2016	1	0	7118
	2	0	5302
	3	0	6015
	4	78	7536
	5	69	7562
	6	51	6476
	7	48	5684
	8	45	4554
	9	105	5148
	10	2240	5372
	11	13950	6339
	12	19313	6111
2017	1	20968	6871
	2	11091	6937
	3	16730	8325
	4	15512	5059
	5	15675	6157
	6	15941	5107
	7	12783	22336
	8	13484	52590
	9	14931	59280
	10	16115	82689
	11	15966	64881
	12	30011	54027
2018	1	36809	68203
	2	43245	68738
	3	60642	85571
	4	56131	94926
	5	57232	97601
	6	55868	103115
	7	34992	81471
	8	35965	81601
	9	67187	104083
	10	117545	175232
	11	101280	273791
	12	110642	271783
2019	1	130453	330729
2019	2	112653	299682

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