Vienna, 10 March 2011

After the announcement of the city of Vienna of an open government strategy some more details and first reactions are now available.

Austrian public broadcaster ORF's Claudia Glechner reports: "Nation's capitol pushes ahead" (translated excerpts):

"Vienna will publish an on-line government data catalogue in April, as Vienna CIO Mittheisz confirmed. Vienna will join the global trend with this step." "Several data sets already were available online, but these are often hard to find, or in formats that aren't machine readable. The catalogue will list available data sets, giving a clear overview."

"At first it is important to publish those datasets that are already available, afterwards next steps will be taken there where a need is visible. "To get a feeling for what is wanted, we will start a public survey" says Mittheisz, which is planned for the second half of 2011."

As of influence are mentioned, open data being part of the Vienna coalition agreement of last November, a mention of open data in February by the national ICT coordination department as a priority, as well as the EU PSI Directive and Commissioner Kroes clear message 'Yes to open data' at the end of last year.

Martin Kaltenboeck of OGD Austria says to the ORF he's "'very excited. The two track approach is something we always propagated.' The OGD Austria initiative has always been in favor of immediately publishing data sets that are readily available, while making decisions about more difficult data sets and cases in due time."

With Vienna's announcement to release its data catalogue in April, it will be overtaking efforts in the Austrian city of Linz where a data catalogue is planned for September by the Open Commons Region Linz project.

On 16 June 2011 the Open Government Data Austria 2011 conference will take place in Vienna, for which registration has already been opened. Both Katleen Janssen and Ton Zijlstra of the ePSIplatform team will be participating as speakers.