Open Data in the Italian Government: the experience of the Town of Florence

Abstract

The City of Florence, Italy, has been carrying out a large data integration and consolidation process since 2003, that was even more improved and targeted to an open and federated approach during 2009. Results of such a process are now being exploited in several current hot eGovernment fields, among which business intelligence, and, more recently, the open data movement. During the year 2011, the City of Florence lead an internal structured assessment process in which each department named an open data referee, and was called to analyse which available public datastores were eligible to be opened up in a suitable website section. The first Open Data section of the City of Florence website was published in October 2011, to which followed the publication of RDF scheme, and SPARQL endpoint for the three above datasets. In February 2012, a brand-new specific open data portal was published, whose main sections were the dataset catalogue, the "Open data for all" section, with human-readable data visualisations, the Linked Data section, and the GeoPortal section, giving access to geospatial data through a standard catalogue and a portal which are based on the open source GeoNetwork and GeoServer projects.