About

What is OpenData.HRO?

Where exactly is the primary school located that is closest to your home and therefore can be reached by your children without having to cross many roads? Is your place of work directly connected with your home via cycle ways? Will there be road works again on your route to the sports ground next Sunday? Data to answer many, many questions like these is out there on the internet somewhere but it is not always easy to find.

OpenData.HRO is a web application serving as a catalogue of useful sets of data. It is run by the municipality of Rostock which is also the owner and publisher of the data. You can collect data here for yourself and others to use. Depending on the type of data, OpenData.HRO may also be able to host it in a database, and provide some basic visualisation tools.

How does it work?

This site is running a powerful piece of open-source data cataloguing software called CKAN, written and maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation. Each dataset record on CKAN contains a description of the data and other useful information, such as what formats it is available in, whether it is freely available, and what subject areas the data is about. One can improve or add to this information (CKAN keeps a fully versioned history).

CKAN powers a number of data catalogues on the Internet. The Data Hub is an openly editable open data catalogue, in the style of Wikipedia. The UK Government uses CKAN to run data.gov.uk, which currently lists 8,000 government datasets. Official public data from most European countries is listed in a CKAN catalogue at europeandataportal.eu. There is a comprehensive list of catalogues like these around the world at dataportals.org, which is itself powered by CKAN.

Open data and the Open Knowledge Foundation

Most of the data indexed at OpenData.HRO are openly licensed, meaning anyone is free to use or re-use the data however they like. Perhaps someone will take that nice dataset of a city's public art that you found, and add it to a tourist map, or even make a neat app for your phone that will help you find artworks when you visit the city. Open data means more enterprise, collaborative science and transparent government. You can read more about open data in the Open Data Handbook.

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a non-profit organisation promoting open knowledge: writing and improving CKAN is one of the ways we do that. If you want to get involved with its design or code, join the discussion or development mailing lists, or take a look at the OKFN site to find out about our other projects.