Swiss Federal Archives provide information on the Federal Administration’s OGD pilot portal
Since the beginning of February 2013, the Swiss Federal Archives SFA, together with the Federal Office of Topography swisstopo, the Federal Statistical Office FSO and the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss, supported by the Federal IT Steering Unit FITSU and the Federal Chancellery FCh, have been working on an Open Government Data project of the Federal Administration (OGD@Bund).
Andreas Kellerhals, Director of the Swiss Federal Archives, presents the goals of the OGD pilot portal.
For the pilot, the participating offices are providing parts of their own data that are already available. The aim is for all federal bodies involved to gain initial experience with OGD, which can serve as a basis for possibly continuing and further developing the portal. The OGD pilot portal will be based on the open source software CKAN. With this solution, the pilot follows existing OGD portals in Europe (e.g. publicdata.eu). The companies itopia and Liip are involved in the project as external service providers.
Available data and possible applications
The offices participating in the project are making parts of their already accessible data available in the pilot portal to be created. This means that a wide range of datasets can now be accessed from a central website, and interested parties can reuse and combine them for new applications. It has not yet been decided which data and how much of it will be available in the pilot portal. But the Swiss open data community has shown, among other things at the make.opendata.ch “Hackdays”, that added value can be generated in a short time with just a few datasets.
The British OGD portal data.gov.uk, which is also based on CKAN, has just celebrated its fourth anniversary.
Next steps
Technical feasibility has been established. Over the coming months the pilot portal will be built and the individual datasets fed in. From mid-September, at the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) in Geneva, the pilot portal will be available to the public. During the subsequent test phase of around six months, initial experience with the OGD pilot portal will be gathered in exchange with its users. This will also serve as a basis for a possible definitive OGD solution in Switzerland, as envisaged in objective B2.12 of the prioritised projects of the Swiss e-government strategy.
For questions about the OGD@Bund project, the project team of the Swiss Federal Archives SFA will be happy to help: opendata@bar.admin.ch.
FAQ on the OGD pilot portal: Swiss Federal Archives
Disclaimer: The author and Opendata.ch board member, Andreas Amsler, works at Liip. André Golliez, President of Opendata.ch, is Managing Partner of itopia ag.
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