Copenhagen, 16 March 2011

(by Ton Zijlstra)

The new Danish geoservice, Geoservices, is available for use. Geoservicen provides API access to geocoded addresses, postcodes, street names, municipalities, police districts, church districts, and voting districts. It also includes a service to transform government geocodes to map coordinates in for instance Google Maps and vice versa do reverse geocoding, which allows developers to use the data more easily in mashups and applications.

Geoservicen is not targeted at 'end-users', so it's not a user-friendly web interface to the services, but rather aimed at developers who need to handle geocoded information as part of their applications.

A quick example, taken from the explanation Finn Jordal of Geoservicen posted today in the Digitaliser.dk platform to illustrate what the service can do:

Say, you want to select all addresses in Denmark, with the house number 77, and a streetname that starts with an 'A' and ends in 'street'. That's as simple as calling the URL http://geo.oiorest.dk/adresser?husnr=77&vejnavn=a*gade which will give you the results.

Or the other way around, say in your application people can draw a rectangle or circle on a map, and you then want to know which addresses fall in that shape. Again, that is as easy as calling one URL, for instance http://geo.oiorest.dk/adresser/55.785,12.451;55.799,12.480

This is an exciting service (as one person on Twitter gives as feedback "Geoservicen looks exciting!"), and it will be interesting to see what types of re-use will pop up in the coming months, that use this new API.

The Geoservicen can be found at geo.oiorest.dk

Unique Process

The way the Geoservicen came about is also very interesting. In November last year the Danish ITST requested feedback and input from the public, in order to help start building the service. As I wrote last November:

"Faced with a small budget to create this geo-service which meant that they could not publish this project as a tender, ITST decided to turn this into an opportunity. Usually what happens, explains ITST in their newsletter, is that with tendering a project a distance is generated between the original question, the work being done and the ability to adapt the plans to change occurring in the world around the project. By forming a core team inside ITST, and bringing on board someone external with knowledge of the geo-field as well as of the technology involved, they created a first draft / prototype quickly and now hope to take it further with the feedback and input of the stakeholders interested in working with the geo-service. This makes for a versatile and fast process. With budget cuts taking place within governments around the EU, this may be an interesting way to move PSI re-use and open government data forward, and enabling governments to do more with less."