Data Resources

1086 · 940 years ago

England's Domesday Book compiled a comprehensive survey of land, people and property for taxation

Commissioned by William the Conqueror to assess the wealth of his new kingdom, the survey recorded landholdings manor by manor, an early demonstration that systematic data collection was a tool of state power as much as administration.

16th century · 526 years ago

The Ottoman Empire conducted detailed cadastral and population surveys across its territories

The tahrir defterleri registers recorded land, households and tax obligations province by province, giving Istanbul one of the most systematic data-driven administrations of its era and a model later studied by European states building their own registries.

1890 · 136 years ago

Herman Hollerith's punch-card tabulating machines processed the United States census

Mechanised counting cut census processing time from years to months and demonstrated that large national data collection exercises could be automated, launching a company that later became IBM and the modern data-processing industry with it.

1970 · 56 years ago

Edgar Codd proposed the relational database model

His paper describing data organised in tables linked by shared values became the basis for nearly all commercial database systems that followed, giving governments and companies a practical way to manage large collections of structured data.

1974 · 52 years ago

The United States passed the Privacy Act

Enacted after Watergate-era concerns about government surveillance, the law restricted how federal agencies could collect, use and share personal records, an early recognition that government-held data was a resource requiring formal governance rather than unrestricted use.

1980 · 46 years ago

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development adopted the first international guidelines on data protection principles

The guidelines set out principles such as purpose limitation and individual access that later shaped national data protection laws across Europe, Asia and Latin America, well before most countries had any comprehensive data legislation of their own.

early 2000s · 26 years ago

Macro-level data governance emerged as a field of norms, principles and rules governing data

Data governance at the macro level first took shape in the early 2000s as a political concept within international relations and Internet governance. It established data as an object of state-level rule-making rather than purely an organisational management concern, distinguishing it from corporate data governance.

December 2006 · 20 years ago

Data governance programme leaders declared at the Orlando conference that governance is 80 to 95 percent communication

At the Data Governance Conference in Orlando, Florida, practitioners running successful programmes characterised the discipline as overwhelmingly a matter of communication rather than tooling. The claim shaped subsequent understanding of what makes data governance capability succeed within organisations.

2009 · 17 years ago

India's Aadhaar programme built the world's largest biometric identity database

Enrolling more than a billion residents through fingerprint and iris data, Aadhaar became the backbone of India's digital public infrastructure, linking welfare payments, banking and tax records to a single identity number and inspiring similar schemes elsewhere.

• Nigeria and the Philippines later studied the model for their own systems

2010 · 16 years ago

Data governance researchers published a framework built on five components of data governance

The framework set out data principles, data quality, metadata, data access and data lifecycle as the constituent components of organisational data governance. It gave institutions a structured way to delegate authority over data and to treat data holdings as managed strategic assets.

2013 · 13 years ago

Edward Snowden's disclosures reshaped global views on data sovereignty and surveillance

Revelations about the scale of American signals intelligence collection prompted governments including Brazil, Germany and later India to pursue data localisation and domestic cloud requirements, treating dependence on foreign-held data as a strategic vulnerability.

2017 · 9 years ago

China's Cybersecurity Law introduced mandatory data localisation for critical information infrastructure

The law required operators in sectors deemed critical to store certain data inside China and pass security reviews before sending it abroad, an early and influential model for treating data storage location as a matter of national security.

2017 · 9 years ago

ISO released the data governance standard ISO/IEC 38505-1:2017

The International Organization for Standardization issued a formal framework for the governance of data, joining other recognised frameworks such as ISO 8000, the CMMI Data Management Maturity Model and DAMA-DMBOK. Standardisation allowed organisations and regulators to reference a common baseline for how data assets should be governed.

September 2025 · 11 months ago

The European Union brought its Data Act into application, unsettling US cloud providers

The law gave users of connected devices and cloud services a right to move their data between providers and imposed interoperability duties that American hyperscalers argued exceeded the compliance burden faced by smaller European rivals.

• Industry groups in the United States lobbied against elements of the law

January 2025 · last year

India notified draft rules under its Digital Personal Data Protection Act

The rules set out consent-management mechanisms, obligations for firms handling children's data and conditions for cross-border transfer, moving India's 2023 data protection law from statute toward practical enforcement after a public consultation period.

2025 · last year

South Korea extended its MyData data-portability framework from finance into healthcare

The scheme, which lets individuals authorise sharing of their own financial records between institutions, was widened to medical records, positioning South Korea's data-portability infrastructure as a model other Asian regulators studied for their own reforms.

• Banks and hospitals had to build new consent-sharing interfaces

2025 · last year

Brazil's data protection authority issued its first major fines under the LGPD

The National Data Protection Authority penalised companies for data-handling breaches at scale for the first time, signalling that Latin America's largest data protection regime, largely dormant for several years after passage, had moved into active enforcement.

2025 · last year

China expanded provincial exchanges for trading data as a factor of production

Exchanges in Shanghai, Beijing and other provinces widened the range of datasets bought and sold under Beijing's policy of treating data alongside land, labour and capital as a formal economic input, though liquidity on most exchanges stayed thin.

• Regulators including the central bank issued parallel rules on data-asset accounting

October 2024 · 2 years ago

Indonesia reached full enforcement of its Personal Data Protection Law

A two-year transition period given to businesses to comply with consent, breach-reporting and data-controller obligations expired, exposing companies operating in Southeast Asia's largest data market to fines and other penalties for the first time.

September 2024 · 2 years ago

Saudi Arabia began enforcing its Personal Data Protection Law

The law, overseen by the Saudi Data and AI Authority, imposed consent, breach-notification and cross-border transfer requirements on companies operating in the kingdom, part of a wider Gulf shift toward treating personal data as a regulated national asset.

2024–2025 · last year

The United Arab Emirates expanded its national genome sequencing programme into a large strategic health-data resource

The Emirati Genome Programme continued sequencing citizens at population scale, building one of the larger national genomic databases and linking it to health records for research and drug development intended to benefit the domestic population first.

2024–2025 · last year

Russia fined and throttled foreign platforms for failing to localise citizen data

Regulators imposed further penalties and, in some cases, slowed access to services that stored Russian users' personal data on servers outside the country, continuing a localisation regime in force since 2015 that pushed Western platforms toward exit or restriction.

2024–2025 · last year

Nigeria's Data Protection Commission issued implementing guidelines under the 2023 Data Protection Act

The guidelines clarified registration duties for data controllers and processors and set out sanctions for non-compliance, part of a wider pattern across Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa of turning framework data-protection laws into enforceable rules.

2022 · 4 years ago

A published research paper proposed a data governance framework grounded in human rights

Prompted by the growing use of large language models and the vast datasets required to train them, the paper argued for governing data collections through a human rights lens. It marked the extension of data governance thinking from organisational value management to the ethical constraints on training data.

2018 · 8 years ago

The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation entered into force

The regulation set strict consent, processing and cross-border transfer rules backed by large fines, and became the template that dozens of countries, from Brazil to India, drew on when writing their own data protection laws.

2017 · 9 years ago

CIO WaterCooler community reported that process efficiency was the leading driver of data governance

The survey found 54% of respondents citing efficiencies in processes as the key driver, 39% regulatory requirements and only 7% customer service. The findings indicated that adoption of data governance was motivated chiefly by internal operational gains rather than external compliance or service pressures.