Opendata.ch congratulates the Federal Government with the new Open Government Data Portal and calls for a consistent implementation of OGD strategy in Switzerland
The Federal Government today launched the new national Open Government Data (OGD) – Portal opendata.swiss. This replaces the previously provisional pilot portal with a permanent platform. The association Opendata.ch congratulates our colleagues in the Open Government Data Switzerland project for this successful milestone, and is particularly pleased about the expanding list of governmental organizations that publish information openly on the new national OGD portal, including SBB and the Canton of Geneva. Furtheremore, the improved publication features encourage hope that other data holdings of the federal government, the cantons and communes will be made available as soon as possible in the form of OGD.
The release and publication of other databases such as company and address registers, road accidents or public administration expenditures as OGD – i.e. machine-readable, free of charge and without any restrictions – are urgently needed. Switzerland misses out every day on valuable impetus for innovation and economic growth when such data are not openly available. In the Global Open Data Index 2015, Switzerland lags behind in ranking 29 (2014: 24). Some reasons for this delay are that the supply of open data in Switzerland until now is very modest, and that a lot of data of the public administration are not machine-readable or fully usable.
The Federal Council adopted the Open Government Data Strategy Switzerland 2014-2018 in April 2014. It states: “The public administration in Switzerland has valuable, high quality data. The Federal Council wishes to make as much of this data as possible openly accessible and freely reusable within the meaning of OGD (…), through OGD to support development of an information society in our country, and to promote and strengthen the leading position of Switzerland in the global information economy.”
The association Opendata.ch stands behind this Strategy, calling on all responsible authorities to implement it in consequence, with as much useful data publication as possible.
Originally posted at opendata.ch