Copenhagen, 2 November 2010,

The ITST, a department of the Danish Ministry for Science, and the IT industry in Denmark will hold a joint conference on November 30th, to evaluate the use and impact of Open Standards in Denmark. The conference will evaluate the results of work on open standards until now, and discuss how future work on the diffusion of open standards should be focused. Open standards are a building block of open government data and the degree to which PSI can be re-used.

For a number of years there has been in Denmark a strong focus on IT standardization and use of open standards. From 1January 2008 it is mandatory for all public authorities to apply a series of open standards in all new public IT solutions.

Working with open standards is designed to ensure that government IT systems can "talk" to each other as to enable public authorities to better achieve vendor independence and thereby stimulate competition in the IT market.

Conference will attempt to answer questions like:

• What has Denmark achieved by the requirement to use open standards?
• How do the public authorities use open standards? What has worked and what has caused problems?
• How do ICT suppliers respond to public authorities' requirements on open standards?
• In what new areas will open standards have a key role to play?

More about the conference and possibility to register at the website of the Danish IT sector.