2026 Platform Roadmap

As described in OpenAQ’s 2026-2028 Strategic Direction, two core objectives drive the technical direction of the OpenAQ platform:

  1. Enhance and maintain the data platform

  2. Expand and preserve data coverage

Roadmap for 2026

1. Overhaul data ingestion

  • We will develop a new consolidated data ingestion process from the ground up, with a focus on observability and transparency into the health of the data ingestion pipeline. The existing process is in need of some new approaches to help us better react to upstream issues and better communicate these issues to OpenAQ users. Since the introduction of air sensors, also known as low-cost sensors, in 2021, our pipeline diverged into two separate processes, one prioritizing air sensor APIs and the other handling the legacy fetch process. Our new process will consolidate data ingestion into a single pipeline, taking lessons from both methods to create a cohesive approach.

2. Provide richer context for measurements

  • Members of the OpenAQ community often request help in understanding data quality. To assist users with how to use and evaluate measurements on the platform, we will expand the metadata (the data that provides context for each measurement) to include more information on instrumentation, quality assurance/quality control (via flags), provenance (who produces and owns the data), and data licensing (how the data can be applied).

3. Strategically increase data coverage

  • OpenAQ will continue to aggregate data from locations across the globe, but will focus new data ingestion in the areas of the world where people are most impacted by pollution and where there is little to no access to data, such as low- and middle-income countries. Through existing and new partnerships we will leverage new sources of air quality data that believe in maximizing the value of their data by making it fully publicly accessible. We will develop new tools for esearchers and smaller projects to upload their data to OpenAQ so that we can share diverse, rich and novel datasets from strategic monitoring locations around the world.

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