[1] The beta version of data.gov.uk has been online since the 30 September 2009; 15 years ago (2009-09-30), and by January 2010 more than 2,400 developers had registered to test the site, provide feedback and start experimenting with the data.

When the project was officially launched in January 2010, it contained 2,500 data sets,[2] and developers had already built a site that showed the location of schools according to the rating assigned to them by education watchdog Ofsted.

[3] On the 3 June 2010, the Treasury released the Combined Online Information System (COINS) data for the financial years 2008/09 and 2009/10.

The 4.3 GB of COIN data included 3.2 million items for the financial year 2009/10, and was released using BitTorrent.

At the time, the UK government stated that data for the current financial year (2010/11) will be released in June 2011.

Within 24 hours of the release the data was also made available through the (now defunct) RA.Pid Gateway webportal run by Rosslyn Analytics.

[9] HM Treasury also cited "the impenetrability of the information to a lay user" and "the potential significant cost and difficulty of rebutting misunderstandings" as reasons for not releasing the data.

[3] The UK Parliament's Public Accounts Committee noted in 2012 that "more could be done to assist interpretation and to build on emerging interest".

In addition to the data searchable through the data.gov.uk site, from 2016 until 2021, a very small number of datasets were made available as 'registers' through the Registers Service.

[12] Registers were structured raw datasets that are intended to be a canonical, reliable, and always up-to-date source of data.

They were offered as JSON, CSV, and RDF files, the latter allowing to link multiple registers together.

In the Netherlands, the DataverseNL Network hosts data deposited by Dutch Universities and Institutes.