Open Economics unifies Brazil’s fragmented official economic data

A new tool called Open Economics has been developed to unify access to Brazil’s official economic data. The project aims to solve the fragmentation caused by different data models used by various institutions, including the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB), IBGE, Tesouro Nacional, SICONFI, Comex Stat, Novo Caged, ANP, EPE, and CVM.

Rather than simply normalizing APIs, the developer focused on semantic resolution to ensure economic accuracy. This approach distinguishes between the concept being requested—such as specific variations of the Selic rate—and the actual availability of datasets that represent those concepts. The system is designed to avoid returning similar but incorrect data series if the exact requested concept is unavailable.

To maintain transparency, the tool incorporates data provenance directly into its model. This ensures that users can identify the original publishing agency, the specific dataset used, the units of measurement, and the time periods represented, preventing the loss of context that often occurs with data abstraction.