Austria adopts CKAN and CC-BY as nation-wide defaults

The following post is by Theodora Middleton, the OKF blog editor.

Fantastic news from our fledgling Austrian chapter, the Open Knowledge Forum Österreich! The cities of Vienna, Linz, Salzburg, and Graz, together with the Chancellor’s office, have established the “Cooperation OGD Austria” – a new alliance bringing together federal, state, and city governments, as well as local communities, to forge common standards and develop conditions in which OGD can flourish to the benefit of all stakeholders.
OKF Austria will be acting as the advisory member to the new group.

Already the members have made some great steps towards the promotion and standardisation of OGD in Austria. All public administration will be free under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0 GB), meaning it can be reused and shared for any purpose, with only attribution necessary. And excitingly for us, CKAN will be used as the default data registry for all OGD and software!

Martin Kaltenböck from OKFO and the Semantic Web Company says:

“The Cooperation OGD Österreich is a very important step in the discussion and creation of national guidelines for Open Government Data in Austria. Harmonised licenses and terms of use, meta data standards, data publishing guidelines as well as technical guidelines help the local, regional, and national data holders and publishers to understand the topic of open data better, as well as supporting them through guidelines that ensure interoperability as well as offering highly re-useable data”