The Government Data Portal for Germany

Fraunhofer FOKUS collaborated with the Federal Ministry of the Interior to build up the official open government data platform in Germany: govdata.de. This talk gives an introduction to open data use cases in Germany, how we approached and eventually architected the platform.

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1. Fraunhofer FOKUS 1 konrad.reiche@fokus.fraunhofer.de | Berlin The Government Data Portal for Germany GovData.de Konrad Johannes Reiche | September 12, 2013 | Nancy, France
2. Fraunhofer FOKUS 2 konrad.reiche@fokus.fraunhofer.de | Berlin Open Government Data Government Data  Motives – Transparency – Innovation – Participation – Efficiency  Core Elements – Machine-readable data – Licenses – Accessibility Open Government Data Venn Diagram by justgrimes
3. Fraunhofer FOKUS 3 konrad.reiche@fokus.fraunhofer.de | Berlin Open Data Example #1 mundraub.de  Many fruit bushes and fruit trees are unused  Wild fruits, private grower, organizations  Data about these plants is collected and published on http://www.mundraub.de  Data comes from people and administrations who submit their knowledge for the public use by hybrid.moment
4. Fraunhofer FOKUS 4 konrad.reiche@fokus.fraunhofer.de | Berlin Open Data Example #2 Glass Recycling Container in Berlin  Glass Recycling Container in Berlin – City – Private Organizations  The Berlin Cleansing Department (BSR) has to clean around them  Problem BSR has no information about the location of many containers  Solution Local administrations do have data about the container’s location and help the BSR by making these data publicly available by Andreas Möller by pixelroiber
5. Fraunhofer FOKUS 5 konrad.reiche@fokus.fraunhofer.de | Berlin Metadata… …and Harvesting  Data is stored and managed distributed  Why? Centralized data is hardly feasible and beyond administrative  Heterogeneous data, distributed competence, conflict of interests  Metadata is used to describe the data  Distributed data storage with central metadata portal  Harvesting: Copying of metadata for making the data accessible, too Portal Document Dataset Dataset Document
6. Fraunhofer FOKUS 6 konrad.reiche@fokus.fraunhofer.de | Berlin Starting Point Data Portals of the Länder  Germany is a federalism – Consisting of 16 states (Länder) – Administrative power divided  Different Data Provider and Portals – Bavaria – Berlin – Bremen – Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) – Hamburg – Rostock – Environmental Information Portal (PortalU) – Geo Data Infrastructure Germany (GDI-DE) – Rhineland-Palatinate – and more… ? DeStatis (David Liuzzo)
7. Fraunhofer FOKUS 7 konrad.reiche@fokus.fraunhofer.de | Berlin Government Data Portal for Germany GovData.de  Launch February 19, 2013  http://www.govdata.de  Prototyped at Fraunhofer FOKUS  Different type of data – Datasets – Documents – Applications  Focus on free licenses – German Data License (de-dl,…) – Creative Commons (cc-by,…) – ...
8. Fraunhofer FOKUS 8 konrad.reiche@fokus.fraunhofer.de | Berlin Quantification in Numbers  February, 2013 – Datasets: 1,123 – Documents: 12 – Applications: 25 – Daily visitors: 2,000  March, 2013 – Daily visitors: 500  August, 2013 – Datasets: 3,797 – Documents: 230 – Applications 15 – Daily visitors: 300 Open Data Licenses on GovData.de
9. Fraunhofer FOKUS 9 konrad.reiche@fokus.fraunhofer.de | Berlin Building GovData.de Strategy  Repository software: CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network) – Data catalogue for storing and distributing data – Developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) – Prevalent format: JSON – API offers REST Interface  Metadata Schema (OGD-Metadata) – Structure used to standardize and unify metadata by data providers – https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/ogd-metadata – JSON Schema, keep it simple (few fields), e.g. document data origins – Why the hassle? Different data providers: very heterogeneous data – Make data accessible: unification needed – Schema not a mere tool, but communicator
10. Fraunhofer FOKUS 10 konrad.reiche@fokus.fraunhofer.de | Berlin Metadata Schema − Example Field Subfield Value Name waste-management-statistics-2013 Title Waste Management: Disposal and Treatment Facility Author Statistical Office Maintainer Juliane Sanger Tags Hessen, Berlin, Visualization, Classification … … … Extras Terms of Use ID: cc-by URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 Spatial Coordinates: [[15.02, 47.16], [15.02, 47.16]] Original Portal http://www.regionalstatistik.de … ….
11. Fraunhofer FOKUS 11 konrad.reiche@fokus.fraunhofer.de | Berlin Architecture GovData.de Portal (Liferay) Information Pool (Web Portal + CMS) User Interface for the Data Catalog Indexer + Thesaurus CKAN CSW/CKAN Harvester REST Interface Browser Apps Web Sites of Public Authorities Subject Catalogs (Geo Data, etc.) Open Data Catalogs (Berlin, Bavaria, Bremen, etc.) REST Interface
12. Fraunhofer FOKUS 12 konrad.reiche@fokus.fraunhofer.de | Berlin What’s next? Outlook  Open data has to be understood as a process  Active communication with current, but also to-be data providers to get more data, but especially more interesting data to GovData.de  Quality of metadata plays a crucial role – Influences the discoverability and searchability – Needs to be improved constantly  GovData.de and its metadata schema should not be an isolated application – Schema compatibility with Government Data Austria (data.gv.at) – DCAT: RDF vocabulary to facilitate interoperability between data catalogs
13. Fraunhofer FOKUS 13 konrad.reiche@fokus.fraunhofer.de | Berlin Metadata Harvesting Techniques  CKAN to CKAN  JSON to CKAN  ISO 19115 to CKAN  CKAN API