Oslo, 17 November 2010

An important step has been taken by the Norwegian Ministry for Government Administration, Reform and Church Affairs today, as this press release announces: Starting January 1st 2011, all suitable data that is being published needs to be in machine readable formats ("Fra 1. januar 2011 skal alle egnede rådata gjøres tilgjengelig i maskinlesbare formater").

Cited from a blogpost on data.norge.no explaining the announcement:

"In an executive decision announced today the Norwegian Ministry of Government Administration, Reform, and Church Affairs has instructed all national government agencies to publish data in machine readable formats. This applies to data (1) that is valuable to the society, (2) that can be reused, (3) that is not confidential or bound by other regulations prohibiting release, and (4) that is presumed to be inexpensive to publish.

This decision is a small step, but it is an important step all the same. Reuse of public sector information has been on many governments’ agenda for a long time, but technological innovation and especially the “appconomy” we have seen emerging the last few years has sparked a renewed interest in the subject. What we need more than anything at the moment are more examples, more experiences and a better understanding of how this whole new world of publishing government data to “the internet of things” actually works.

By publishing, in machine readable formats, all the data that is inexpensive to publish, the ministry hopes and believes that enough data will be published in 2011 to get those examples and gain those experiences we need to be able to decide in which formats, with what licenses — and at what price — all the rest of the data should be published."