The following guest post is from Martin Kaltenböck and Thomas Thurner from the Semantic Web Company, members of our brand new Austrian chapter, Open Knowledge Forum Österreich!
The OGD2011 – the first Open Government Data Conference in Austria -took place on 16 of June 2011 in Vienna and was great success!
The fully booked conference convened experts, practitioners and change agents from austria and abroad. The many different stakeholders were unified by a spirit of triggering concrete actions regarding technologic implementation, legislative efforts, future business cases and bringing OGD to the broader public. As Ton Zijstra – one of the keynote speakers of OGD2011 – said after the conference: “Austrian open government data seems to be unique in the sense that all stakeholders, including traditional PSI re-users who have been in the debate for almost two decades, are well represented. This makes for a balanced and lively community, and it is starting to show in the results, such as in Vienna and Linz.”
In total there were 6 tracks with 2-4 speakers each:
- P1: Basics and introduction in Open Government Data
- P2: Impact on society
- P3: Open Data in Europe
- P4: Best practises in Austria
- W1: Impact on industry/economy
- W2: Technologies and infrastructure
The OGD2011 was inaugurated by the Viennese city councillor Sandra Frauenberger who is responsible for the first Austrian open data catalogue: http://data.wien.gv.at published on 17th of May 2011. John Sheridan from the National Archives UK, our international keynote, gave a great talk about the status and activities of UK Linked Open Government Data!
In the closing talk of the conference, Rufus Pollock (OKFN) and Martin Kaltenböck (SWC) announced the establishment of the Austrian Chapter of the OKFN – the OKFO (Open Knowledge Forum Oesterreich) that will promote open knowledge in Austria from now on (see: http://gov.opendata.at/okfo) in co-operation with the UK OKFN.
All the documentation from the OGD2011 is now available online, including photos, video, news and the full programme, at www.ogd2011.at/doku!
