How to request public data in open formats
Draft FOIA requests under Romanian Law 544/2001 and Law 179/2022 to receive machine-readable data.
Check existing public catalogue releases
Search data.gov.ro and institutional portals before filing a formal request. Citing existing entries saves administrative time.
data.gov.ro ↗Cite the statutory open-format mandate
Explicitly cite Article 5 of Law 544/2001 in conjunction with Law 179/2022 on public sector information reuse, obliging authorities to supply machine-readable files (CSV, JSON, XML).
Romanian legislative portal ↗Request column metadata dictionaries
Ask for column definitions and nomenclature codelists. Tabular dumps without metadata definitions are frequently unusable for empirical analysis.
DCAT-AP 3.0.1 ↗
A pitfall to avoid
Public bodies often supply scanned PDF images in response to FOIA inquiries. State explicitly in your request that image formats are unacceptable when source data is managed in databases.
What you can produce
A legally structured FOIA request template tailored for open-data requisitions with mandatory machine-readable citations.
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