NEURC will provide license information in the open data format
The energy regulator updated its register of licensed companies as part of the project supported by DiXi Group.
The National Energy and Utilities Regulatory Commission (NEURC) launched publication of the updated register of licensed companies whose activity the agency regulates. Comparing to the previous version, the information is updated immediately after changes are filed, and becomes available on the Unified State Web Portal of Open Data, DiXi Group’s announcement states.
“Besides the frequency of updating information in the license register, the volume of disclosed information has increased as well. The NEURC is now publishing not only the license issuance-related information but also the agency’s further decisions in a licensing case, in particular, revocation of license. It also publishes information about the instances when a company was denied a license for a certain type of economic activity. The information about decisions suspending or restoring a license, narrowing down or expanding the scope of licensed activity will be published in the license register as well. The dataset will also store information about licenses which are no longer valid,” the announcement says.
The work on preparing the NEURC’s license register and register of companies operating in the energy and utilities sectors in a machine-readable format was done with the expert support from DiXi Group.
“For a long time, different parts of the license register were handled by different specialists inside the regulatory agency: for example, one person was responsible for the gas sector, another for the electricity sector, and so on. As a result, detailed information about licensees which the National Commission accumulated over many years was filed in different formats, each having its own specifics. And considering the human factor, the number of contextual errors has also significantly increased, like incorrect EDRPOU code, incorrect effective date of a license or missing data in records,” DiXi Group manager Andrii Bilous said.
Therefore, preparation of a consolidated public version of the license register was an extremely labor-intensive and low-productive process. Considering the quality of primary information, all data had to be manually brought into a uniform format and each time, the correctness of records had to be checked.
“At first, we helped prepare a unified table structure for the license register to make sure that all responsible specialists prepare data on the basis of a uniform principle. After that, we helped process all available archived data concerning company licensing decisions according to the unified structure, and then, helped “cleanse” this data of errors and verify it jointly with NEURC specialists. Finally, we taught the regulatory agency’s specialists to keep the register of licensed companies according to a uniform approach. We expect that the aforementioned data will soon become available on the open data portal, data.gov.ua, as well,” Mr. Bilous added.
As a result of these efforts, all sectoral data of the license register was brought into a single machine-readable format. Thanks to that, the regulatory agency’s specialists are able to find the necessary information, itemized by companies or by decisions, while spending the minimum time on that. The process of keeping the register was significantly simplified and optimized in time. From now on, the regulator’s staff can devote more time to analysis of information, not to mechanically keeping it.
The list of the NEURC’s public data is available here: https://bit.ly/2QqeVVi
“Data is updated once any changes are made, almost every week. In addition to publication on the NEURC website, we expect publication of this data on data.gov.ua portal,” DiXi Group says.
As reported earlier, DiXi Group was involved in the past in creating an online instrument for the NEURC: the List of Electricity Suppliers. It enables consumers to quickly find in various regions of Ukraine the suppliers which joined distribution agreements with the system operators concerned.
The opening of data by the NEURC took place as part of USAID’s Energy Sector Transparency project implemented by DiXi Group.
