Opening up City of Helsinki Case Management Solution (AHJO)

Ville Meloni - Forum Virium HelsinkiOpen Knowledge Festival – 18th of September 2012

HACK Workshop 1

Background

• City of Helsinki wants to serve citizens and developers better by opening access to decision making information.

• Earlier the city has taken case management solution called AHJO in use. It is being used by city decision making bodies.

• AHJO renders HTML-pages for city of Helsinki hel.fi website as human readable documents. Now machine readable output as open data is in the works.

• Basically opening data in AHJO means regular XML dumps. In the future possibly also programming layers.

Helsinki Region Infoshare - Overview

“Making urban and regional information quickly and easily accessible to all. The information can be used freely at no cost”

To develop a network of

information owners who maintain and

open their data following common

guidelines.

To build a web service through

which the data can be easily found, accessed and

utilised.

Provide information as machine readable ”raw data” which is easy to

utilize in various applications and web-services.

To pilot an open data activity model and its implications to both the

producers and end users of the data.

Timeline, financing, implementation

09.04.23 Forum Virium Helsinki 4

Collaboration with many different organisations to open data i.e. government, other municipalities, municipal organizations, etc.

Financing•Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Kauniainen•Finnish innovation fund (Sitra)•Ministry of Finance

Implementation•Directive board

•City of Helsinki Urban Facts

•Forum Virium Helsinki

Timeline2010-2012 (pilot)

2012- (on-going function)

Collaboration between data producers and developers using that data!

www.hri.fi open data catalogue

Easy to find, access and utilize data

•Maintaining of the metadata. Actual data is hosted elsewhere.

•A channel for data users to give feedback and request new data.

•Brings visibility to existing data pools and encourages more usage.•Concrete instructions for agencies on how to open data

Scope of HRI open data

1. Statistics and estimates– Urban phenomenon: demographics,

employment, housing, commuting, etc.– Geographical granularity: municipal,

district, grid-level, etc.

2. Geospatial data– Data that supports presentation of

statistical and other data on a map, i.e. district-level shapefiles.

3. Any other data– Public services, financials, mass-

transportation, infrastructure, decision making related data, etc.

Opening AHJO – Story so far

Autumn 2011 Winter 2011 Spring 2012 Summer 2012 Autumn 2012

• Reseach on city decision making document managing systems by Antti Poikola for data journalism event

• http://muistio.tieke.fi/ahjo

• Meetings with city of Helsinki administration and communications

• HRI starts to work with the city of Helsinki to drive opening of AHJO

• Helsinki gives green light for experimentation

• First internal XML-test dump is created by AHJO’s IT-integrator Tieto corporation

• HRI organizes a developer workshop at Forum Virium Helsinki to get input to opening of AHJO

• www.hri.fi/fi/ajankohtaista/helsingin-paatosasiakirjojen-avaaminen-kehittajille/

• www.hri.fi/fi/keskustelut/helsingin-paatoksenteon-avaaminen/

• City gives OK to create first API as an XML-dump file as proposed in the developer workshop

• Tieto creates first version of XML-dump method

• City IT starts looking for hosting solution to AHJO (and other) open data

• Meetings to fine tuning XML- and publishing details

• Target is to have first version of API (daily XML-dump files) on a public server as open data in autumn

• Engaging developers to further develop the open data API

Example of a related city web service:

Helsinkikanava.fi – City council videos on the web…

open.helsinkikanava.fi

• …as open data

• City decision making related open data service

• Provides REST-API to city council videos + metadata of city council meetings

Examples of existing end-user services that could utilize AHJO open data

Punakyna.net•Enables commenting and social media sharing of city decisions•Currently containing city of Tampere

Kansanmuisti.fi•Comparing representative’s election campaign statements against actual parliamentary decisions

Future

Decision making data + geo-coding + financial data + city project data + city infrastructure data + external data +

analytics + visualizations = hopefully some useful services for communications and

participation enhancing democracy

Next

• Insides of AHJO XML and open data publishing presented by Tieto corporation

Thank you!

www.hri.fiwww.facebook.com/helsinkiregioninfoshare

@HRInfoshare

semantic.hri.fi

Slideshare.net/helsinkiregioninfoshare

Ville MeloniForum Virium HelsinkiProjektipäällikköville.meloni@forumvirium.fiwww.forumvirium.fi

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