Vienna, 20 July 2011

(by Ton Zijlstra)

Four Austrian cities (Vienna, Linz, Salzburg, Graz) and the Office of the Chancellor have decided to coordinate their open government data activities, and to consult with various stakeholder groups on each decision. Together they founded the "Cooperation Open Government Data Austria". "Only by agreeing to shared standards can effective conditions be created that are of value to all user groups." the document describing the agreement reads.

In the first meeting of Cooperation OGD Austria on July 13th the following 8 points were decided:

1. Government held data will be provided for free under a Creative Commons By Attribution licence (CC BY 3.0 AT)
2. Data platforms will conform to the naming structure data.NAME.gv.at for their urls
3. Data platforms will be using open source software as much as possible, and CKAN will be used for the metadata catalogue. Software solutions in use will be provided as a package to other public sector bodies.
4. A common metadata structure will be developed in close cooperation with the Austrian open data community, and should be created shortly by a work group
5. In data specifications URI/URL schema, structure, formats, metadata, linked data need to be covered
6. Public sector bodies that have a data platform can offer other public sector bodies to publish their data as well, if it is not feasible for a public sector body to run its own platform
7. The Office of the Chancellor will coordinate the creation reference documentation for the federal, state, and local levels, in which the agreements of the Cooperation Open Government Data Austria will be documented
8. To increase national visibility and transparency as well as allow for a 'single point of contact' to Austrian data sets internationally, a national data catalogue portal will be created using CKAN. The Office of the Chancellor will be leading this effort.

In the next few months these points will be further detailed and put into practice.