Oslo, 28 September 2010

The Norwegian government has chosen a provider for the data.norge.no open government data catalogue. This provider will build the data catalogue using CKAN and Drupal. Both are also the core building blocks of the British data.gov.uk and are rumoured to also be the building blocks for the Dutch government data catalogue, that is currently in the planning stage.

CKAN is an open source tool that serves as a registry for data sets, that themselves are stored at the original source. CKAN provides data set descriptions and search capabilities. CKAN is originally build by the Open Knowledge Foundation, and maintained by a growing community of developers.

Drupal is an open source CMS (widely in use, amongst others at whitehouse.gov, data.gov.uk and NASA) that allows for easy roll out of especially community features. Drupal, originating in Belgium, also enjoys a global and very active community of developers. Recently data.gov.uk had released the Drupal modules they created to use with CKAN. These are now to be re-used for data.norge.no

Data.norge.no is trying to have a beta version of the site up and running by the end of October.

In a posting today, the first ever in English on data.norge.no the Norwegian story and reasoning is explained in more detail.

"A little while ago, the Norwegian ministry of government administration, reform and church affairs launched the web site data.norge.no — this web site — as a blog. Data.norge.no is not going to remain only a blog, however. It will soon become a national data catalog as well.

Interestingly enough, this blog post is our first blog post in English. And the timing is perfect. Yesterday’s announcement, which I’ll get back to in a moment, is a small step into the international open data community. Blogging about our project in English is another.

We’ve been working on a national data catalog for a while, aiming to create something I would like to call “cleverly unspectacular”. I believe we have succeeded."

"Cleverly unspectacular" chimes with the quote from Tim O'Reilly to "do the least possible, for others to build on" when it comes to government as a platform.