Best Practice: Establish Open Government Portal for data sharing

Challenge

Public administrations consist of government bodies of differing sizes and often their information systems lack interoperability. Data sets are of different sizes sometimes relating to small localities only, which makes them less interesting to the broader community such as the infomediary sector. Furthermore, the data sets are in different formats which complicates their re-use.

Solution

A data portal is established by the government (national, regional or local). This may be managed in-house or by a contractor, perhaps from the R&D or education sector where computer engineering students and researchers are involved in direct re-use of data in development of innovative services (web and mobile applications).

Why is this a Best Practice? What’s the impact of the Best Practice

A portal fulfils many functions:

• it acts as a platform through which datasets are made available, catalogued and made searchable;
• it promotes the provision of metadata and makes it easy for that metadata to be added at the time of publication;
• it acts as a show case for applications that re-use the data;
• it can also act as a community hub.

Links to the Revised PSI Directive

Techniques, Platforms, Discoverability

Why is there a need for this Best Practice?

• To promote and improve interoperability between the different local councils´ information systems.
• To offer a larger volume data sets to re-users, including the infomediary sector.
• To promote the use of open data formats and common vocabularies to facilitate the re-use of data sets.
• To generate interest and engage with the community.

What do you need for this Best Practice?

Data portal software can be developed from scratch, bought off the shelf or obtained as open source software. The best known example of an open source package is CKAN.