Oslo, 4 November 2010,

At data.norge.no the Norwegian government is preparing for the release of a national open government data catalogue. As part of this they have been working on drafting a Norwegian open data license, to help government departments to release data with a clear license addressing their particular concerns, while at the same time setting the default on 'no strings attached' publishing of data. Now the people at data.norge.no are asking for feedback on another document: a set of guidelines for public service bodies on how to enable re-use. This is reminiscent of the technical guide the Danish ITST recently made available, and intends to give a quick overview of the most important things to take into account. At the same time the guidelines start with defining what re-use of PSI actually is.

Other topics, next to describing re-use, addressed are:

• Making data available in open standards, structured and machine readable formats
• Using a RESTful interface for datasets that change frequently
• Describing datasets in a simple way, to help re-users understand the the datasets. Dublin Core metadata standards are advised.
• Licensing the data in the most unrestricted way possible
• Excluding personal data and other non-public data
• Indicating the level of quality of the data
• Releasing the data once, e.g. as an experiment, does not mean the PSB is expected to maintain doing that indefinitely.

Your feedback on the proposed guidelines is welcomed at data.norge.no