Dear Peter, Just to let you know, I've now blogged this here:
http://blog.okfn.org/2009/08/25/opengovse-a-registry-of-open-government-data-in-sweden/ Best wishes and lets definitely keep in touch! Jonathan On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 9:59 PM, Peter Krantz<[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 21:06, Jonathan Gray<[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Dear Peter, >> >> This looks like a fantastic initiative and we'd love to blog about it >> on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog (blog.okfn.org)! Any further >> background information about the site, as well as relevant URLs >> (press, interviews, history...) would be much appreciated. > > Hi! > > Thank you for your kind feedback! I got started with open government > data when I was building eurlex.nu - a personal project to create a > commentable semantic web version of european union legal information > (not online yet). At first I just blogged my frustration: > > http://www.peterkrantz.com/2008/broken-eu-legal-information/ > > Then I thought "I'll build it myself and show them how it should be > done". However, when I requested the raw XML data for the European > Union law i received a reply that it would cost me 10.000 EUR to get > access to it (plus 3.000 EUR for each additional language). As a > logical consequence I was determined to scrape the data and provide a > better XML version for others to use for free. > > Previously I was a strategic development officer at the Swedish > Administrative Development Agency (Verva). Before Verva was shut down > at the end of 2008 I got the opportunity to spend some time listening > into the W3C eGovernment interest group. There I learned more about > initiatives in other countries and discovered how far behind we are in > the swedish public sector. > > Thus, I spent a week of my summer vacation to set up opengov.se. > Initially it is a registry of swedish public sector datasets. Each > dataset has details about what the data is about, available formats, > license and if it is online or not. Currently, there are only 3 > datasets that allows reuse and have data available in at least one > open format. Users can comment on datasets and suggest new datasets > for inclusion. > > Many agencies charge for raw data access. An example is SMHI, the > Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, that has loads of > weather data. Since the data costs money, people using weather > information in their applications get it from the Norwegian > authorities instead (http://www.yr.no/). > > The launch of the website has lead to some interesting results. I have > been contacted by both civil servants that want help with open data > plans and politicians that want advice on how legislation should > change to increase the amount of open government data. I hope to be > able to support the MP:s that have contacted me in creating a bill to > increase access to data. > > opengov.se was mentioned in the morning show on swedish national > television on august 7. I was unaware of that until I received error > messages from my hosting provider about the site responsiveness. It > was also featured in the editorial of a newspaper here: > > http://www.expressen.se/ledare/1.1663751/johanna-nylander-microsoft-hotar-var-demokrati > > The guidelines I have created are based on the principles laid out by > the http://www.opengovdata.org/ group but modified to fit with our > current legislative framework. > > The next step I am working on is to increase transparency by scraping > proposed bills and public consultations from the central government > website (think govtrack.us "light"). > > Please send me an email if you want more information. Re-use the text > in this email anyway you like. > > Regards, > > Peter > -- Jonathan Gray Community Coordinator The Open Knowledge Foundation http://www.okfn.org _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
