Copenhagen, 3 November 2010,

In a news letter the Danish ITST department is asking for feedback and contributions to plans to build a geo-data service, as tweeted by Finn Jordal, one of the ITST people involved.

"We would like to have cooperation with you on further development of Geoservicen. First and foremost we want to hear you whether it is a good idea to develop Geoservicen? Should we continue the development and operation of Geoservicen? If you think it's a good idea, we would welcome your feedback about the design of Geoservicen, ideas for improvements and ideas to other functionality within the given framework.

The idea is that we are using our joint efforts will have designed and established a service that can make it easier for us non-geokyndige to create interesting applications based on official geocoded data.

Finn Jordal /@ finnjordal, IT and Telecom Agency"

Original text: "Vi vil gerne have et samarbejde med dig om videreudviklingen af Geoservicen. Først og fremmest vil vi gerne høre dig om det overhovedet er en god ide at udvikle Geoservicen? Skal vi forsætte udviklingen og driften af Geoservicen? Hvis du synes at det er en god ide, vil vi så gerne høre din mening om designet af Geoservicen, ideer til forbedringer samt ideer til anden funktionalitet indenfor de givne rammer.

Ideen er at vi vha. vores fælles indsats får designet og etableret en service, som kan gøre det lettere for os ikke-geokyndige at etablere interessante applikationer baseret på myndighedernes geokodede data."

First draft of the geo-service

The first draft of the geo-service has three components of functionality:

• A transformation function between the coordinates system that the Danish cadastral office uses as well as many other Danish government bodies, and the coordinates system with which other services such as Google Maps, or GPS based apps work.
• Making data available data of DAGI, the Danish Cadastre, and national survey KMS. This concerns data about postcodes, municipalities, parishes, constituencies, jurisdictions and police districts.
• Making address data available from the new BBR, by the Erhvervs og Byggestyrelsen ("Enterprise and Building authority")

This makes it possible to search for postcodes of places that contain a certain string of letters in their name (like 'havn' or 'bro'), to get shape files for the boundaries of a city, or map it, to figure out in which region a certain parish or jurisdiction is etc. And all of that in various data formats such as KML, JSON, XML etc.

Feedback is asked about whether this is seen as useful, and in which direction to take next steps.

Unique setup

For the development of this geo-service the ITST uses an interesting set-up. 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.