Use case of a dual open strategy in the canton of Zurich/Switzerland
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| Number of Parts | 183 | |
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| License | CC Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 3.0 Germany: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor and the work or content is shared also in adapted form only under the conditions of this | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/32130 (DOI) | |
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| Production Year | 2015 | |
| Production Place | Seoul, South Korea |
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00:00
CASE <Informatik>Duality (mathematics)Strategy gameOpen setOpen sourceWitt algebraChainGoodness of fitStrategy gameComputer animation
00:19
Open sourcePole (complex analysis)Strategy gameOpen setStandard deviationComputing platformBuildingTexture mappingCommunications protocolCategory of beingOverlay-NetzComplex (psychology)Maß <Mathematik>Function (mathematics)ZugriffskontrolleComponent-based software engineeringGroup actionAttribute grammarFile viewerElectronic mailing listVector potentialGame controllerTouchscreenLevel (video gaming)MereologyField (computer science)Different (Kate Ryan album)WebsiteFile viewerMaxima and minimaMultiplicationServer (computing)Computer fileRevision controlCAN busMetadataWeb 2.0Overlay-NetzSoftware testingStandard deviationSystem administratorSoftware frameworkCartesian coordinate systemGroup actionConnectivity (graph theory)Computing platformCommunications protocolVector spaceOpen setWordRepresentational state transferTheorySeries (mathematics)Open sourceStrategy gameInformationOffice suiteFront and back endsBitAverageWeb applicationStructural loadCategory of beingRight angleExtension (kinesiology)Arithmetic meanLoginAttribute grammarCombinational logicMobile appSoftware developerDatabaseVector potentialRuby on RailsComputer animation
05:51
Open setService (economics)Inclusion mapLattice (order)Cantor setProgrammable read-only memoryStatisticsPhysical systemStrategy gameGroup actionImplementationCondition numberFreewareVector potentialFeedbackFile formatPersonal digital assistantOpen setWeb serviceStrategy gameGoodness of fitRegulator geneArithmetic meanState of matterSet (mathematics)Closed setProcess (computing)SpacetimePoint (geometry)Level (video gaming)Condition numberPhysical lawVector potentialGraph (mathematics)Archaeological field surveyData qualityCASE <Informatik>FeedbackCartesian coordinate systemImplementationSoftware developerCentralizer and normalizerBuildingPhysical systemMereologyGroup actionBitPlanningBasis <Mathematik>Content (media)AuthorizationSeries (mathematics)Block (periodic table)Web 2.0Structural loadInformationGeometryComputer animation
11:23
Visualization (computer graphics)Square numberPoint (geometry)Maxima and minimaSoftwareSatelliteMetreTheorySlide ruleSet (mathematics)Computer animation
11:54
Endliche ModelltheorieLevel (video gaming)Open set
12:22
Mathematical analysisComputer iconMobile WebQuadrilateralExecution unitStrategy gameArchaeological field surveyOpen setGraph (mathematics)Open sourceProduct (business)Self-organizationPressureFocus (optics)Pattern languageMultilaterationMultiplication signAdaptive behaviorConfidence intervalParameter (computer programming)TwitterMathematicsOpen sourceArchaeological field surveyOpen setAreaLevel (video gaming)Projective planeDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Uniform resource locatorPresentation of a groupResultantPay televisionCartesian coordinate systemCASE <Informatik>NumberSet (mathematics)Field (computer science)Self-organizationStrategy gamePressureGraph (mathematics)Focus (optics)State observerAuthorizationSanitary sewerGroup actionProduct (business)Series (mathematics)Arithmetic meanRootQuicksortRepresentation (politics)Line (geometry)Visualization (computer graphics)Insertion lossComputer animation
18:19
MereologyOpen setComputer iconPole (complex analysis)Open sourceStrategy gameForm (programming)Database transactionSocial classOpen setField (computer science)CASE <Informatik>MathematicsMereologyPresentation of a groupAuthorizationCalculationOpen sourceVapor barrierDirection (geometry)Computer animation
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AreaCASE <Informatik>Representational state transferSoftwarePoint (geometry)Open sourceVector potentialCondition number
22:42
Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
Good afternoon. My name is Briska Haller. I will present together with Firmin Kalberer. We want to give you an insight into the dual open strategy in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland. Just make it big.
00:22
Just that you know, where is Switzerland and Zurich? This is Europe. Switzerland is in the center of Europe. It has a population of a little bit more than 8 millions. We are quite a few if you compare to South Korea, which is 50 millions.
00:40
Switzerland is a confederation. It's consisting of 26 cantons. That means it's based on the principles of federalism. Federalism gives the cantons a lot of autonomy. That means they can decide independently about lots of issues like open data strategies, open source strategies.
01:04
We are in the canton of Zurich, one of the 26 cantons. The canton of Zurich lies in the north of Switzerland. Yes, here's some information. Our office is in the city of Zurich.
01:21
Some words about us. Firmin Kalberer, he works at Sourcepol. Sourcepol develops customer-specific applications in the field of geo-information. They're all based on open source components. He's the architect of the web GIS solution of the canton of Zurich.
01:42
I work at the department of geo-information at the Cantonal Administration of Zurich. So let's start with the dual open strategy. The dual open strategy means we have an open source strategy and an open data strategy. What they have in common, you will hear later.
02:03
Firmin will start now to explain to you about the open source strategy of the canton of Zurich. I will tell you more about the technical part, which is all open source and the web GIS infrastructure consists of a post GIS database and
02:23
the web GIS itself uses map server for rendering maps and map fish app server as an application server written in Ruby on Rails on the server side using open layers XJS.
02:40
There's a mobile version and a desktop version. So it's open layers 2 for the desktop version and open layers 3 for the mobile version. More about this map fish app server. It's a platform where you can, it's like
03:01
a developer framework with base functionality and you can extend it in many aspects and it uses the map fish REST protocol and uses OGC standards for map access. We have many layers
03:21
in the canton of Zurich, so we organize that in topics. Topic is one map composed of many layers and there are more than 100 topics. We categorize them and put keywords and so on. We can combine maps with background maps and overlay maps and to produce them we
03:43
use the map server, map files and extract metadata for the web application. Legends are fully customizable and you can create complex searches. This is a screenshot. Here is a special search and you see some topics and a search field.
04:09
And a part of the map. We do digitize a lot and editing is important, so we need access control on topics, layers and attributes
04:27
for WMS and WFS as well. The map components are based on XJS 4 and the viewers are customizable, so you can use different viewers for different purposes
04:42
from a minimal mobile viewer to this portal you just saw. You can have multi sites, meaning you can have like internet site and an internet site if you want that. And you have an administration backend and can have user groups which are
05:03
self-organized. This is a screenshot of the backend. You can administrate permissions, users, categories, topics and so on. So what is the potential of open source? That's the first part. You only pay for what you really need.
05:24
You have no vendor login. We are one vendor of open source applications, but I can tell our customers if you if you don't happy with us anymore, you can go to another vendor and
05:41
which has the know-how and he has all rights to to make extensions and so on. And it's also better if you want to cooperate with other authorities. You can make
06:01
you can finance work together. You can have synergies and using this work, development work and this did happen. Also, you can participate in development. So for OpenLayers 3, the kind of Zurich sponsored some functionality, so it goes also into the
06:22
building blocks of the whole system. Second part of the strategy with an open data strategy. Switzerland has an open government data portal for a couple of years already.
06:45
It's a central point for data, for open government data and the Canton of Zurich is the first canton that joined this open government data portal. It's still the only one other cantons will follow. We have already
07:04
57 data sets from the Canton of Zurich on the portal and from these 5745 are geo data sets. We published all the data as web map services and web feature services. Now what is the legal basis for publishing geo data as open government data?
07:28
We have at the federal level, we have the federal open government data strategy 2014 until 2018. The goal of the strategy is to release official data, government data and the coordinated
07:43
publication and provision of official data. It means at one point at this portal and one really important point is to establish an open data culture. This is at the federal level. So how does it look like at the cantonal level? Here
08:01
we don't have a strategy, but we have an open data action plan 2015 until 2017. It's for the Canton of Zurich. It's actually an implementation of the federal OGC strategy at cantonal level. So you can say it's actually a cantonal OGD strategy.
08:24
What kind of data is suitable for publishing as open government data? There we have three conditions that must be fulfilled in order to be published. First of all, data must be accessible to the public.
08:42
There can't be any restriction on usage and it must be free of charge. I will just explain more about these three points. Data accessible to the public. Usually you need the law for this. We have the cantonal act on geo information and there
09:00
it's written official geo data on the federal, cantonal and communal regulation shall be accessible to the public and may be used by anyone unless this is contrary to overriding public or private interests. So this is the first point. We have this law, so we are lucky. We have the first condition. The first condition is met.
09:22
The second point is no restriction on usage. There can't be any restriction, for example, regarding commercial use. So if there is a restriction regarding commercial use, we can't publish it as open data. The third point is it must be free of charge and there can't be any regulation on fees.
09:45
Like we have a cadastral survey data. There we have regulation on fees, so we can't publish these data sets as open data. So you have seen like these 45 data sets that we have published on the Open Government Data Portal. They all meet these three conditions.
10:08
So what does open mean? We have an open government data license. It's a CC by license. I don't say more about this. You know what a CC by license is. What is the potential of open government data and public benefit?
10:25
We think the best is that data is widely used. That means we get better data quality through user feedback. Almost every day we get feedback from users when they have mistakes, so we can improve the data quality.
10:42
Then it's governmental transparency. People see what we work, on what data sets we work, so there's a closeness to the citizens. Important is also citizen participation in the political process. Then open government data is a base for innovation and loads of
11:03
applications get developed, so it's actually an economic engine. After all, I think if you have good base data that you publish as open data, it's a locational advantage for the content of Zurich. So I want to show you some use cases of open government data in Switzerland.
11:24
This is a data set, a LiDAR data set. A guy downloaded, this is Michael Schritz, he downloaded all the data and he sent me the picture and he developed a software that can visualize the LiDAR points.
11:41
And you see here, this LiDAR data is very accurate. We have like minimum of eight points per square meters, so it's a really nice visualization of the city of Zurich. It's the city center. Then this is the city model of Ooster. Andreas Neumann, he downloaded all the LiDAR data.
12:02
We gave the publishers open data and he calculated a city model, a level of detail two model of the city of Ooster. They use it there because it's open data. They could afford to do it. Otherwise, if they had to pay for the data, they could have never done something like that.
12:23
If you want to know more about the LiDAR project of Zurich, I had a presentation yesterday. As soon as the presentations are online, you can have a look at it. So this is an example from the city of Zurich. The city of Zurich, they published
12:42
the locations of all public toilets in Zurich. So there was a company that developed an application where you can always find the nearest toilet in your area. So sometimes it's quite useful. This is an example from the federal level.
13:02
These are health care insurance premiums, MAP, and this is data that the Ministry of Health published as open data in Switzerland. Depending on the canton you live, you pay different health insurance taxes. So with this application, you see where it's better to live regarding the health insurance premiums.
13:28
So let's get back to the dual open strategy. We started with the open source strategy first and only afterwards switched to the open data strategy. So we wanted to know if this is the way
13:46
usually you do it, if this is the best way. And that's why we ask other cantons and cities how they did it. How does it look like in their cantons? So we made a little survey and asked them
14:00
when did you start with open source and when did you start with open data? Is there a way that is better and a way that is not so good? So this is the result from the survey. It's actually the chronological order of open strategy adaption and please note that it's not a non-representative survey.
14:23
So we didn't ask all the cantons, all the city of Zurich. So I want to show you what you see here. You see that open source started mainly in 2000 in Switzerland. You see here?
14:41
2000, most of the cantons that I asked, they started. It's actually the first time they started with open source. Open data only started later. There are some pioneers here, Lechtern or Solothurn, they started in 2005 or 2006, but most of the cantons, they started with open data in
15:05
2010. This is actually the pattern that we see here. What we also see is that mostly the change came from open source towards open data. There are a few examples like the city of Zurich.
15:20
They started with open data first and they haven't yet open source in use, but usually the cantons, they started with open source first and afterwards they started with open data. What are the observations? As we have seen, the switch to open source continuously is after
15:43
2000 and we see a trend towards open data beginning in 2010. Activities in different authorities, they seem to influence each other in a positive way. They get inspired from other success stories,
16:01
benefit from other's experiences and exchange know-how. We see that open source activities often precede open data activities in Switzerland. What is our experience? We started with open source. It was easier for us because we had financial arguments. We could say it's cheaper,
16:26
we need less money if you switch to open source. That's why we had less opposition inside the organization. The reliability of the open source products, this leads to growing confidence in the open source community.
16:42
It means it's the start of a cultural change. That's important, the cultural change. Open source, therefore, is a forerunner for open data in our case. What we have also seen is that an increasing number of players in the field of geodata, this leads to growing pressure from external stakeholders.
17:04
The focus then moves away from financial to a cultural ideological aspect. What are the lessons that we learned with our dual strategy? It's important to have a dialogue with the community, not only in open source, also in open data.
17:23
You have to active participate in communities at hack nights and get to know what the needs are from the communities. You also have to be aware that open data causes opposition inside the organization. They always have arguments about financial reasons. You want to earn money with your data,
17:43
so it's not easy to convince them. What we have seen, that visually appealing data sets, they help. If you have nice data sets that you can show to the public and they make nice visualizations, then you can convince them easier.
18:02
Laws and politics, they are needed in order to have the data released. And you also need a lot of persuasive efforts and lobbying. That's important. You have to speak about it and influence public perception. That's how the cultural change can start.
18:21
We have seen that it's a long and stony road. It's stony, but you see the sky, the blue sky, so there's hope. And the conclusion is a dual open strategy pays off as both parts mutually promote the cultural change. So if you have efforts in one open field, they stimulate also the activities in the other.
18:45
So all we can say is promote an open idea in a dual way. In our case, this worked well. That's it. If you have questions, you can ask Permin for the first part, the more technical part,
19:00
or you can ask me for the open data part.
19:21
Hello, thank you for the presentations. I'm here. And my question is, you mentioned that open source, it's a viable solution because it lets you spend less money. But what about the cost of the transactions passing from a proprietary solution to the free solution?
19:46
I'm asking because in Lugano we are approaching these discussions and these seems big barriers. I think it's easier to convince people because they think at first that they don't spend money anymore because it's free.
20:02
That's how to convince them. And as soon as you have them, I mean, later on, you pay money. But maybe you can also add something. I mean, it's not fair to calculate that, to make that into a calculation of a proprietary solution and an open source solution.
20:25
I mean, you have costs for switching in any direction. Any change in the generic, it's called otherwise. Next, it was a very good question and it was one thing I thought about including my presentation also on this kind of consideration.
20:47
I'm very happy that you mentioned it. Do you have any more questions? One thing to add, we forgot to add the URL of the source code, which is important.
21:11
Okay, I guess you've heard that one. So I'd like to point out a few things that I thought was quite good in this presentation.
21:26
One was the potential of open source software and the thing I want to point out now was that you mentioned that using open source software you can avoid it. Just a few weeks ago, I was talking to some colleagues from another national answer.
21:49
They had really big problems with this, that they were so blocked in that they cannot switch any open source software that they want. That can also be the case.
22:03
And also good points on the demands on data conditions. There might be some conditions on some data that we cannot publish them as open data. We know that for sure in our talk.
22:23
Finally, I'd like to thank you all for coming here. Thanks to all the speakers. I'm glad you enjoyed the rest of the conference. And a good conference from now on.