Last year on a whim I bought data.mn. I’ve been working with Mongolian data for nearly 10 years now, and it seemed like an obvious thing to get. The owner had been sitting on it for years and didn’t do anything productive with it. I wanted to build a single portal with all things data on it about Mongolia.
The government has a few open data portals already, but they are generally not very easy to use. Search is somewhat poor, there are no built in visuals, or they don’t provide a secure connection (see below):
These portals are:
- opendata.gov.mn - general open data portal based on CKAN, currently SSL certificate expired
- opendata.burtgel.gov.mn - legal entity registration and things like that
So I wanted to make something dead simple, has great search, and work with AI agents. What resulted is a blazingly fast website that just gives you the data with a chart, CSV file, or Excel file. Excel file exports show a shortened form often used as a statistical table. CSV exports are “long form” which is ideal for creating visualizations in PowerBI or other visualization tools.
For AI agents, if the server detects if an incoming user is a person or a bot (we welcome bots!). If it is a bot, it redirects to a text only page which gives a description of the data and a the data itself in text form. This allows you to ask a question from ChatGPT or Claude about Mongolian data and it can use real, up to date data to answer you. Without this AI chatbots usually default to reports from Asian Development Bank or other international organizations with usually out of date data.
Data.mn currently has 120 published datasets mostly from Mongolian government sources. I hope to add more private datasets to the platform, something that is relatively rare unfortunately. If you have any ideas let me know!
