Towards a Middleware for Data Management in Support of Open Government Data

Abstract

Citizens demand it and politicians support it: Hence, the pressure to realize Open Governmental Data (OGD) projects is growing for public administrations and governments. Many pilot projects have already been started or are under way, though regulatory and organizational foundations are not yet mature enough in all respects. But even if all nontechnical questions will be answered, it still remains unclear how to set up a sustainable and economically reasonable software support for the OGD realization not for the one-shot set-up of an Open Data portal, but for its continuous running over a longer period of time, well embedded into existing technical and non-technical infrastructures. The widespread research and open source solutions for Open Data here mostly support only the very last steps of the OGD governance and publishing workflow, namely realization of a portal. In this paper, we suggest an approach how to use an existing data management infrastructure for all the early steps, including data collection, selection, harmonization, transformation and export in different formats, including metadata. To this end, we suggest to employ a suitably extended version of the disy Cadenza professional software for administration-internal spatial data management and reporting which is, up-to-date, mostly in use in German and Austrian environmental agencies.