Use case of a dual open strategy in the canton of Zurich/Switzerland
Haller, Priska
With a dual 'open'-strategy the department of geoinformation at the canton of Zurich/Switzerland opts for a strategic orientation towards open source and open data: Open in the sense of an open web-mapping- infrastructure based on open source components: Mapfish Appserver was developed as a framework for building web map applications using OGC standards and the Mapfish REST protocol. It is freely available under the new BSD-license (-appserver.github.io/). The Ruby on Rails gem comes with the following out-of-the box features: - Organize maps by topics, categories, organisational units, keywords and more - Combine maps with background and overlay topics with adjustable opacity - Import UMN Mapserver mapfiles to publish new topics within seconds - Fully customizable legends and feature infos - Creation of complex custom searches - Rich digitizing and editing functionality - Role-based access control on topic, layer and attribute level - Access control for WMS and WFS - Rich library of ExtJS 4 based map components - Multiple customizable viewers from minimal mobile viewer to full featured portal - Multi-site support - Built-in administration backend - Self-organized user groups maps.zh.ch, the official geodata-viewer of the canton of Zurich, was developed using Mapfish Appserver. It contains more than 100 thematic maps and is considered an indispensable working tool for everyone working with spatial data in the canton of Z?rich/Switzerland. 'Open' in the sense of Open Government Data: Zurich is the first canton participating in the national open data portal opendata.admin.ch. The portal has the function of a central, national directory of open data from different backgrounds and themes. This makes it easier to find and use appropriate data for further projects. The department of geoinformatics aims to open as many geo-datasets as possible for the public by publishing them on the national OGD-portal. The open geodata is issued in form of web services ? Web Map Services (WMS), WebFeature Services (WFS) and Web Coverage Services (WCS) - and contains a wide range of geodata from the fields of nature conservation, forestry, engineering, infrastructure planning, statistics to high resolution LIDAR-data.
 Good afternoon, my name is Priska Haller. I will present together with Firmin Kalböhrer. We want to give you an insight into the dual open strategy in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland. Just make it big, okay. 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 million. We are quite a few if you compare to South Korea with its 50 million. Switzerland is a confederation. It's consisting of 26 canton. That means it's based on the principles of federalism. Federalism gives the canton a lot of autonomy. That means they can decide independently about loads of issues like open data strategies, open source strategies. We are in the canton of Zurich, one of the 26 canton, the canton of Zurich last in the north of Switzerland. Yes, here's some information. Our office is in the city of Zurich. Some words about us. Firmin Kalböhrer works at Sourceball. Sourceball develops customer specific applications in the field of geo information. They are all based on open source components. He is the architect of the Web GIS solution of the canton of Zurich. I work at the department of geo information at the cantonal administration of Zurich. 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. Firmin will start now to explain 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. The Web GIS infrastructure consists of a PostJS database and the Web GIS itself uses map server, for rendering maps, and mapfish app server as an application server written in Rubion Rails on the server side using OpenLayers.xjs. It has a mobile version and a desktop version, so it's OpenLayers 2 for the desktop version and OpenLayers 3 for the mobile version. More about this mapfish app server, it's a platform where you can... It's like a developer framework with base functionality and you can extend it in many aspects. It uses the mapfish REST protocol and uses OTC standards for map access. We have many layers in the canton of Zurich, so we organize that in topics. The 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 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 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 for WMS and WFS as well. The map components are based on XJS4 and the viewers are customizable, so you can use different viewers for different purposes from a minimal mobile viewer to this portal you just saw. You can have multi-sites, meaning you can have like an internet site and an internet site if you want that. You have an administration backend and you can have user groups which are self-organized. You have this screenshot of the backend where you can administrate permissions, users, categories, topics, and so on. So what is the potential of open source? It's the first part. You only pay for what you really need. You have no vendor lock-in. You have one vendor of open source applications, but I can tell our customers if you don't have it with us anymore, you can go to another vendor which has the know-how and has all rights to make extensions and so on. It's also better if you want to cooperate with other authorities. You can make finance work together. You can have synergies in using this work, development work, and this did happen. Also, you can participate in development, so for OpenLayers 3, the kind of service sponsored some functionality. So it goes also into the building blocks of the whole system. I will continue with the second part of the strategy with an open data strategy. Switzerland has an open government data portal for a couple of years already. It's a central point for open government data. The canton of Zurich is the first canton that joined this open government data portal. It's still the only one. Other canton will follow. There are already 57 data sets from the canton of Zurich on the portal and from these 57, 45 or geodata sets, we published all the data as web map services and web feature services. Now what is the legal basis for publishing geodata as open government data? 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, the coordinated 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. How does it look like at the cantonal level? Here 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. You can say it's actually a cantonal OGD strategy. 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. 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 a law for this. We have the cantonal act on geo information and there it's written official geo data under federal, cantonal and common legislation 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. 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. There can't be any regulation on fees. We have a test survey data, there we have regulation on fees, so we can't publish these data sets as open data. So you have seen like this 45 data sets that we have published on the Open Government Data Portal, they all meet these three conditions. 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? 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, they say when they have mistakes, so we can improve the data quality. Then it's governmental transparency, people see what we work and 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 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 continent of Zurich. So I want to show you some use cases of open government data in Switzerland. This is a data set, a Leider data set, a guy downloaded, this is Markl Schritt, he downloaded all the data, he sent me the picture, he developed a software that can visualize the Leider points. You see here this Leider 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 Uster, Andreas Neumann, he downloaded all the Leider data, we published as open data, and he calculated a city model, a level of detail, two model of the city of Uster, 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. If you want to know more about the Leider project of Zurich, you can see the presentation yesterday, as soon as the presentations are online, you can have a look at it. This is an example from the city of Zurich, the city of Zurich, they published the locations of all public toilets in Zurich, so there was a company that developed an application where you always find the nearest toilet in your area, sometimes it's quite useful. This is an example from the federal level, these are healthcare insurance premiums, MEP, 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. With this application you see where it's better to live regarding the health insurance premiums. 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. We wanted to know if this is the way, usually you do it, if this is the best way, that's why we asked other canton and cities how they did it, how does it look like in their canton. We made a little survey and asked them, when did you start with open source and when did you start with open data, is there a way that is better or a way that is not so good? This is the result from the survey, it's actually the chronological order of open strategy adoption. Please note that it's not a non-representative survey, so we didn't ask all the canton, all the cities of Zurich. I want to show you what you see here. You see that open source started mainly in 2000 in Switzerland. You see here, 2000 most of the canton they asked, they started. It's actually the first time they started with open source. Open data only started later. There are some pioneers here like Bern or Solothon, they started in 2005 or 2006, but most of the canton they started with open data in 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, they started with open data first and they haven't yet open source in use, but then usually the canton 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 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, benefit from other 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 say it's cheaper, 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 led to growing confidence in the open source community. 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. 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. You have to active participate in communities at Hacknites 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, 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. Laws and politics, they are needed in order to have the data released. 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. 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. The conclusion is a dual open strategy pays off as both parts mutually promote the cultural change. If you have efforts in one open field, they stimulate also the activities in the other. 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 Pyramin for the first part, the more technical part, or you can ask me for the open data part. Thank you. Hello. Thank you for the presentations. I'm here. You mentioned that open source is a viable solution because it lets you spend less money. What about the cost of the transactions passing from a proprietary solution to a free solution? I'm asking because in Lugano we are approaching these discussions and these seem 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. That's how to convince them. As soon as you have them, I mean later on you pay money, but maybe you can also add something. It's not fair to calculate that to take that into consideration from a proprietary solution and open source solution. I mean you have costs for switching in any direction. That's because it's very good for the best. One thing I thought about including micro-solution also is consideration. Do you have any more questions? I have one thing to add. We forgot to add the URL of the source code. It is important. It's mafishabservice.itapp.com. I guess you heard that one. I'd like to point out a few things that I thought was quite moving in this presentation. One was the potential of open source software and the thing I want to point out now was that you mentioned using open source software. I know it in the window of you. I guess recently a few weeks ago I was talking to some colleagues from another not-superior national institute. They had real big problems with this. There are so many things that they cannot switch in for the open source software that they want. That can also be the case. There are also good points and good demands on data conditions. There might be some conditions on some data that we cannot publish as open data. We know that for sure in our program. Finally I would like to thank you all for coming here. Thanks to all the speakers and I hope you enjoyed the rest of the conference. Have a good conference from now on.
 Good afternoon, my name is Priska Haller. I will present together with Firmin Kalböhrer.  We want to give you an insight into the dual open strategy in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland.  Just make it big, okay. 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 million.  We are quite a few if you compare to South Korea with its 50 million.  Switzerland is a confederation. It's consisting of 26 canton. That means it's based on the principles of federalism.  Federalism gives the canton a lot of autonomy. That means they can decide independently about loads of issues like open data strategies, open source strategies.  We are in the canton of Zurich, one of the 26 canton, the canton of Zurich last in the north of Switzerland.  Yes, here's some information. Our office is in the city of Zurich.  Some words about us. Firmin Kalböhrer works at Sourceball.  Sourceball develops customer specific applications in the field of geo information.  They are all based on open source components. He is the architect of the Web GIS solution of the canton of Zurich.  I work at the department of geo information at the cantonal administration of Zurich.  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. Firmin will start now to explain 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.  The Web GIS infrastructure consists of a PostJS database and the Web GIS itself uses map server, for rendering maps,  and mapfish app server as an application server written in Rubion Rails on the server side using OpenLayers.xjs.  It has a mobile version and a desktop version, so it's OpenLayers 2 for the desktop version and OpenLayers 3 for the mobile version.  More about this mapfish app server, it's a platform where you can...  It's like a developer framework with base functionality and you can extend it in many aspects.  It uses the mapfish REST protocol and uses OTC standards for map access.  We have many layers in the canton of Zurich, so we organize that in topics.  The 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 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 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 for WMS and WFS as well.  The map components are based on XJS4 and the viewers are customizable,  so you can use different viewers for different purposes from a minimal mobile viewer to this portal you just saw.  You can have multi-sites, meaning you can have like an internet site and an internet site if you want that.  You have an administration backend and you can have user groups which are self-organized.  You have this screenshot of the backend where you can administrate permissions, users, categories, topics, and so on.  So what is the potential of open source?  It's the first part. You only pay for what you really need.  You have no vendor lock-in.  You have one vendor of open source applications, but I can tell our customers if you don't have it with us anymore,  you can go to another vendor which has the know-how and has all rights to make extensions and so on.  It's also better if you want to cooperate with other authorities.  You can make finance work together.  You can have synergies in using this work, development work, and this did happen.  Also, you can participate in development, so for OpenLayers 3, the kind of service sponsored some functionality.  So it goes also into the building blocks of the whole system.  I will continue with the second part of the strategy with an open data strategy.  Switzerland has an open government data portal for a couple of years already.  It's a central point for open government data.  The canton of Zurich is the first canton that joined this open government data portal.  It's still the only one. Other canton will follow.  There are already 57 data sets from the canton of Zurich on the portal and from these 57, 45 or geodata sets,  we published all the data as web map services and web feature services.  Now what is the legal basis for publishing geodata as open government data?  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,  the coordinated 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. How does it look like at the cantonal level?  Here 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.  You can say it's actually a cantonal OGD strategy.  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.  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 a law for this.  We have the cantonal act on geo information and there it's written official geo data under federal,  cantonal and common legislation 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.  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.  There can't be any regulation on fees.  We have a test survey data, there we have regulation on fees,  so we can't publish these data sets as open data.  So you have seen like this 45 data sets that we have published on the Open Government Data Portal,  they all meet these three conditions.  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?  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, they say when they have mistakes,  so we can improve the data quality.  Then it's governmental transparency, people see what we work and 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 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 continent of Zurich.  So I want to show you some use cases of open government data in Switzerland.  This is a data set, a Leider data set, a guy downloaded, this is Markl Schritt,  he downloaded all the data, he sent me the picture,  he developed a software that can visualize the Leider points.  You see here this Leider 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 Uster, Andreas Neumann, he downloaded all the Leider data,  we published as open data, and he calculated a city model,  a level of detail, two model of the city of Uster, 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.  If you want to know more about the Leider project of Zurich,  you can see the presentation yesterday, as soon as the presentations are online,  you can have a look at it.  This is an example from the city of Zurich,  the city of Zurich, they published the locations of all public toilets in Zurich,  so there was a company that developed an application  where you always find the nearest toilet in your area, sometimes it's quite useful.  This is an example from the federal level, these are healthcare insurance premiums, MEP,  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.  With this application you see where it's better to live regarding the health insurance premiums.  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.  We wanted to know if this is the way, usually you do it, if this is the best way,  that's why we asked other canton and cities how they did it,  how does it look like in their canton.  We made a little survey and asked them, when did you start with open source  and when did you start with open data, is there a way that is better or a way that is not so good?  This is the result from the survey, it's actually the chronological order of open strategy adoption.  Please note that it's not a non-representative survey, so we didn't ask all the canton,  all the cities of Zurich.  I want to show you what you see here.  You see that open source started mainly in 2000 in Switzerland.  You see here, 2000 most of the canton they asked, they started.  It's actually the first time they started with open source.  Open data only started later.  There are some pioneers here like Bern or Solothon, they started in 2005 or 2006,  but most of the canton they started with open data in 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, they started with open data first  and they haven't yet open source in use, but then usually the canton 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 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, benefit from other 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 say it's cheaper, 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 led to growing confidence in the open source community.  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.  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.  You have to active participate in communities at Hacknites 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, 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.  Laws and politics, they are needed in order to have the data released.  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.  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.  The conclusion is a dual open strategy pays off as both parts mutually promote the cultural change.  If you have efforts in one open field, they stimulate also the activities in the other.  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 Pyramin for the first part, the more technical part,  or you can ask me for the open data part.  Thank you.  Hello. Thank you for the presentations. I'm here.  You mentioned that open source is a viable solution because it lets you spend less money.  What about the cost of the transactions passing from a proprietary solution to a free solution?  I'm asking because in Lugano we are approaching these discussions and these seem 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. That's how to convince them.  As soon as you have them, I mean later on you pay money, but maybe you can also add something.  It's not fair to calculate that to take that into consideration from a proprietary solution and open source solution.  I mean you have costs for switching in any direction.  That's because it's very good for the best.  One thing I thought about including micro-solution also is consideration.  Do you have any more questions?  I have one thing to add. We forgot to add the URL of the source code.  It is important. It's mafishabservice.itapp.com.  I guess you heard that one.  I'd like to point out a few things that I thought was quite moving in this presentation.  One was the potential of open source software and the thing I want to point out now  was that you mentioned using open source software.  I know it in the window of you. I guess recently a few weeks ago I was talking to some colleagues from another  not-superior national institute. They had real big problems with this.  There are so many things that they cannot switch in for the open source software that they want.  That can also be the case.  There are also good points and good demands on data conditions.  There might be some conditions on some data that we cannot publish as open data.  We know that for sure in our program.  Finally I would like to thank you all for coming here.  Thanks to all the speakers and I hope you enjoyed the rest of the conference.  Have a good conference from now on.
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Good afternoon, my name is Priska Haller. I will present together with Firmin Kalböhrer. We want to give you an insight into the dual open strategy in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland. Just make it big, okay. 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 million. We are quite a few if you compare to South Korea with its 50 million. Switzerland is a confederation. It's consisting of 26 canton. That means it's based on the principles of federalism. Federalism gives the canton a lot of autonomy. That means they can decide independently about loads of issues like open data strategies, open source strategies. We are in the canton of Zurich, one of the 26 canton, the canton of Zurich last in the north of Switzerland. Yes, here's some information. Our office is in the city of Zurich. Some words about us. Firmin Kalböhrer works at Sourceball. Sourceball develops customer specific applications in the field of geo information. They are all based on open source components. He is the architect of the Web GIS solution of the canton of Zurich. I work at the department of geo information at the cantonal administration of Zurich. 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. Firmin will start now to explain 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. The Web GIS infrastructure consists of a PostJS database and the Web GIS itself uses map server, for rendering maps, and mapfish app server as an application server written in Rubion Rails on the server side using OpenLayers.xjs. It has a mobile version and a desktop version, so it's OpenLayers 2 for the desktop version and OpenLayers 3 for the mobile version. More about this mapfish app server, it's a platform where you can... It's like a developer framework with base functionality and you can extend it in many aspects. It uses the mapfish REST protocol and uses OTC standards for map access. We have many layers in the canton of Zurich, so we organize that in topics. The 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 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 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 for WMS and WFS as well. The map components are based on XJS4 and the viewers are customizable, so you can use different viewers for different purposes from a minimal mobile viewer to this portal you just saw. You can have multi-sites, meaning you can have like an internet site and an internet site if you want that. You have an administration backend and you can have user groups which are self-organized. You have this screenshot of the backend where you can administrate permissions, users, categories, topics, and so on. So what is the potential of open source? It's the first part. You only pay for what you really need. You have no vendor lock-in. You have one vendor of open source applications, but I can tell our customers if you don't have it with us anymore, you can go to another vendor which has the know-how and has all rights to make extensions and so on. It's also better if you want to cooperate with other authorities. You can make finance work together. You can have synergies in using this work, development work, and this did happen. Also, you can participate in development, so for OpenLayers 3, the kind of service sponsored some functionality. So it goes also into the building blocks of the whole system. I will continue with the second part of the strategy with an open data strategy. Switzerland has an open government data portal for a couple of years already. It's a central point for open government data. The canton of Zurich is the first canton that joined this open government data portal. It's still the only one. Other canton will follow. There are already 57 data sets from the canton of Zurich on the portal and from these 57, 45 or geodata sets, we published all the data as web map services and web feature services. Now what is the legal basis for publishing geodata as open government data? 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, the coordinated 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. How does it look like at the cantonal level? Here 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. You can say it's actually a cantonal OGD strategy. 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. 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 a law for this. We have the cantonal act on geo information and there it's written official geo data under federal, cantonal and common legislation 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. 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. There can't be any regulation on fees. We have a test survey data, there we have regulation on fees, so we can't publish these data sets as open data. So you have seen like this 45 data sets that we have published on the Open Government Data Portal, they all meet these three conditions. 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? 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, they say when they have mistakes, so we can improve the data quality. Then it's governmental transparency, people see what we work and 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 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 continent of Zurich. So I want to show you some use cases of open government data in Switzerland. This is a data set, a Leider data set, a guy downloaded, this is Markl Schritt, he downloaded all the data, he sent me the picture, he developed a software that can visualize the Leider points. You see here this Leider 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 Uster, Andreas Neumann, he downloaded all the Leider data, we published as open data, and he calculated a city model, a level of detail, two model of the city of Uster, 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. If you want to know more about the Leider project of Zurich, you can see the presentation yesterday, as soon as the presentations are online, you can have a look at it. This is an example from the city of Zurich, the city of Zurich, they published the locations of all public toilets in Zurich, so there was a company that developed an application where you always find the nearest toilet in your area, sometimes it's quite useful. This is an example from the federal level, these are healthcare insurance premiums, MEP, 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. With this application you see where it's better to live regarding the health insurance premiums. 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. We wanted to know if this is the way, usually you do it, if this is the best way, that's why we asked other canton and cities how they did it, how does it look like in their canton. We made a little survey and asked them, when did you start with open source and when did you start with open data, is there a way that is better or a way that is not so good? This is the result from the survey, it's actually the chronological order of open strategy adoption. Please note that it's not a non-representative survey, so we didn't ask all the canton, all the cities of Zurich. I want to show you what you see here. You see that open source started mainly in 2000 in Switzerland. You see here, 2000 most of the canton they asked, they started. It's actually the first time they started with open source. Open data only started later. There are some pioneers here like Bern or Solothon, they started in 2005 or 2006, but most of the canton they started with open data in 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, they started with open data first and they haven't yet open source in use, but then usually the canton 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 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, benefit from other 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 say it's cheaper, 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 led to growing confidence in the open source community. 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. 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. You have to active participate in communities at Hacknites 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, 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. Laws and politics, they are needed in order to have the data released. 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. 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. The conclusion is a dual open strategy pays off as both parts mutually promote the cultural change. If you have efforts in one open field, they stimulate also the activities in the other. 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 Pyramin for the first part, the more technical part, or you can ask me for the open data part. Thank you. Hello. Thank you for the presentations. I'm here. You mentioned that open source is a viable solution because it lets you spend less money. What about the cost of the transactions passing from a proprietary solution to a free solution? I'm asking because in Lugano we are approaching these discussions and these seem 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. That's how to convince them. As soon as you have them, I mean later on you pay money, but maybe you can also add something. It's not fair to calculate that to take that into consideration from a proprietary solution and open source solution. I mean you have costs for switching in any direction. That's because it's very good for the best. One thing I thought about including micro-solution also is consideration. Do you have any more questions? I have one thing to add. We forgot to add the URL of the source code. It is important. It's mafishabservice.itapp.com. I guess you heard that one. I'd like to point out a few things that I thought was quite moving in this presentation. One was the potential of open source software and the thing I want to point out now was that you mentioned using open source software. I know it in the window of you. I guess recently a few weeks ago I was talking to some colleagues from another not-superior national institute. They had real big problems with this. There are so many things that they cannot switch in for the open source software that they want. That can also be the case. There are also good points and good demands on data conditions. There might be some conditions on some data that we cannot publish as open data. We know that for sure in our program. Finally I would like to thank you all for coming here. Thanks to all the speakers and I hope you enjoyed the rest of the conference. Have a good conference from now on.
strategy in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland. work at the department of geo information at the cantonal administration of Zurich. Let's start with the dual open strategy. The dual open source. The Web GIS infrastructure consists of a Rails on the server side using OpenLayers.xjs. It base functionality and you can extend it in many aspects. It uses the mapfish REST protocol and uses OTC standards for map access. We have many 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 you can create complex searches. This is a map. We do digitize a lot and editing is important, so we need access control on topics, layers, and attributes for WMS and WFS as well. The map components are based on XJS4 and the viewers are customizable, so you can use minimal mobile viewer to this portal you just backend and you can have user groups which are the potential of open source? It's the first has an open government data portal for a couple of years already. It's a central point for open government data. The canton of Zurich is the first canton that joined this open government sets from the canton of Zurich on the portal and all the data as web map services and web feature publishing geodata as open government data? At goal of the strategy is to release official data, OGC strategy at cantonal level. You can say it's that we have published on the Open Government applications get developed, so it's actually an good base data that you publish as open data, open government data in Switzerland. This is a of all public toilets in Zurich, so there was a you pay different health insurance taxes. With source towards open data. There are a few code. It is important. It's