Belgian Climate Center — Open Data Portal

Climate data about Belgium exists in abundance — scattered across institutions, formats and websites, with no single place to find it all. The Belgian Climate Center set out to change that: a central, authoritative portal where anyone could discover climate data about Belgium, regardless of where it originally lived.

They came to me via a referral from the Belgian Biodiversity Platform, for whom I had built a similar portal. Rather than jumping straight to implementation, we started with an advisory phase: mapping their needs, defining the right technical approach, and building a shared plan before a single line of code was written. That groundwork made the implementation phase faster, smoother, and far less likely to produce surprises.

The result is a standards-compliant open data portal built on CKAN — with a custom theme, custom extensions, and full alignment with DCAT-AP, the European standard for data portal interoperability.