Implemenetation of project OpenData - short summary

Introduction

• Project OpenData aims to provide reference Open Source implementation for open publishing of data,
• implementation suitable for national, sector or individual solutions.

Project goals

• to define formats and open source technologies which can be used by institutions to publish data - to create a pilot implementation of Open Data Node,
• promotion of sharing of public data between citizens and government agencies and between government agencies too,
• support for third sector for development of solutions on top of this project,
• to achieve legislation about publication of data generated by public sector using Creative Commons licensing,
• to promote the idea of using open source solutions in government,

Implementation plan

1. definition of formats for sharing of data
2. selection of appropriate OSS technologies
3. implementation of an open source package and deployment methodology
   1. creation of prototype collective catalogue
   2. creation of prototype data warehouse (DWH) for collection, processing and storage of meta data about data published by institutions
   3. development of a reporting layer on top of the data for comfortable creation of reports and modeling of data using web interface - Open Data Portal
4. launch of "support center" helping future users of this system with its integration with their other systems

This implementation will allow organizations (ministries, municipalities, non-profit organizations, corporations) publish data from its internal systems.

Every organization can choose what kind of data will publish and how often. We believe, that open communication between organizations and the public will create a sensible compromise between secretiveness and openness.

Principles

• reuse of what's already available
• selection of the best of what's available
• help with improving selected formats and technologies to become even better using feedback from the implementation, testing and usage of this solution
• conversion of data in specialized, scarcely available data formats into more accessible form

Example #1: Publishing of digital documents is peaking in the area of catalogization and archiving of literature and cultural works. As cataloguing of cultural data is very similar to cataloguing of government data, we can borrow already defined communication standard Open Archives Initiative Protocol (OAI-PMH).

Example #2: Reuse of proven and existing concepts from other spheres (Web 2.0, social networks, etc.) will allow solution to effectively publish the data for further reuse.

Solution architecture

How it works

Installed open source package Open Data Node collects documents and metadata about them, then process them and provides them to the public, institutions and to applications.

• A document can enter an Open Data Node in a following ways:
  • User submits a document and fills-in a metadata for it using a webinterface.
  • Open Data Node, using a Harvester, automatically collects and processes (OCR, metadata extraction, conversion, linking with registries, etc.) documents published elsewhere.
  • Authorized users generate enhanced on new content (through verification, commenting, correction, correlation or other enhancement of the collected data).

• Access to the collected data is provided on several levels:
  • publishing for further harvesting by other systems (for example other instances of Open Data Node): OAI-PMH, FTP, HTTP, ...
  • interfaces for 3rd party applications: standardized interfaces (WebService, REST, ...) in various formats (XML, JSON, ...)
  • web interface: services with added value: Open Data Portal, ...
  • mass export: RDF/XML, SKOS, DublinCore

• Open Data Portal (http://):
  • presentation of the data stored in Open Data Node itself: goolge-like search, faceted browsing / filtering, display on the map or timeline, tables, ...
  • the list of institutions participating in the data publication: Wiki, blog, later more formalized directory

Illustation of multiple Open Data Nodes connected into hierarchy

For more information about the project, please visit http://opendata.sk/liferay/projects .

For more information about who we are, please visit http://opendata.sk/liferay/o-nas .