I’ve been trying to avoid “blogging the news” recently but this one was hard to pass up.
The Canadian City of Edmonton was in the news for a couple of unrelated reasons this morning, first of all as the Olympic torch arrived, and secondly for plans that they have to work with Microsoft’s OGDI platform.
From Peter Galli’s blog on Port25;
The Canadian City of Edmonton has become the first North American city to use Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) solution, and is working with the company to develop the region’s first public open data catalogue, an online site that will give citizens and developers easier and more transparent access to information and allow them to develop new solutions and suggest ideas that enhance public infrastructure and services.
More information on OGDI can be found here. From the page;
The Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) is a cloud-based collection of software assets that enables publicly available government data to be easily accessible. Using open standards and application programming interfaces (API), developers and government agencies can retrieve the data programmatically for use in new and innovative online applications, or mashups that can help:
- Improve citizen services
- Enhance collaboration between government agencies and private organizations
- Increase government transparency
- And more…
OGDI promotes the use of this data by capturing and publishing re-usable software assets, patterns, and practices. The data repository already holds over 60 different government datasets that are readily available for use in new applications, and is continuously updated with additional government datasets.
Edmonton’s Open Data Catalogue is already public and operating in “community preview mode”’ if you want to go take a look.