Estonian Information Society Yearbook 2011/2012. Karin Kastehein

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of data sets is best done in formats that can be opened and processed using freeware applications. This includes .odt format document files as well as some of the most common formats for structured data, like .csv, json and .xml.

      Formats that can be opened and modified by freeware applications are also well-suited for re-use.

      Situation in Estonia

      In Estonia as well, there is now considerable political will to make public sector information more re-usable. And thus the government’s programme16in the section on “From E-state to I-state” has a subsection devoted to open data entitled “Putting the state’s e-resources in the service of citizens and companies”. The government programme promises the following explicitly:

      • we will make the state’s spatial data public in modifiable form – this will give citizens and companies the possibility to develop purposeful services on the basis of government data;

      • to increase transparency and inclusion and stimulate the private sector to develop new applications, we will make public data – i.e. state and local government data machine-readable;

      • we will set the aim of making databases created collaboratively between private and public sector available to companies and individuals for development.

      Estonia is home to an open data community17, and it has a page on Facebook. A movement called Garage48 is active in preparing services, and their motto is “less talk, more action”. The Association of Information Technology and Telecommunications initiative is also to be reckoned with their 2011 conference “From vision to solution” focused on obstacles to developing new e-services.

      In Estonia, the availability of public information can be rated exemplary. As the fairly liberal Public Information Act18 makes it obligatory to release to the public, via a government department’s website, document register and databases, the department’s unrestricted information, more information than in most other countries is subject to being made public. For instance, every public sector institution must release information on their structure, salaries, document register, reports, statistics, budgets, development plans. The Public Information Act distinguishes between 32 types of information to be published. Considering that Estonia has 2,000 public sector institutions and each one of them should publish an average of ten datasets, the volume of reusable information is at least 20,000 datasets.

      But unlike most countries, the public sector is not required to publish information in reusable form. The published datasets are not always in open formats. The primary formats used are PDF and MS Office (proprietary software) oriented formats. Thus this is predominantly one-star data.

      Public sector information is stored in databases. But public databases and their open service interfaces are unspecified and thus hard to re-use. There is no legal requirement that descriptions of such registers and their services be published in the state information system’s management system (RIHA). For instance, the Government Office’s document register has been realized in model fashion, its output is xml data, but the data and the search interface as well as the option of saving output as in xml format has not been described to potential users. Submitting to the document register the query: https://dhs.riigikantselei.ee/avalikteave.nsf/contractsbydate?

      open&path=2011/12|Detsember, we get the response in the following form:

      <document noteid=”NT0017AE7E”>

      <field name=”date”>30.12.2011</field>

      <field name=”docid”>L11165</field>

      <field name=”subject”>Trükiste kujundamine ja trükkimine</field>

      <field name=”documenttype”>Töövõtuleping</field>

      <field name=”contractstartdate”>30.12.2011</field>

      <field name=”contractenddate”>20.01.2012</field></document>

      But the Government Office document register is a positive exception to the rule. Most registers of this type output HTML text that cannot be processed directly for re-use.

      Public services will not do away with the need to download. For the most part, Estonian public services lack search result download facilities, to say nothing of mashup options.

      Pursuant to the Public Information Act, the data processed in a database must be publicly available, if there are no access restrictions on them established by or deriving from law. But personal data in a database is not to be published unless there is an obligation to do so under law. Thus speed camera data, and incidents registered by the police, among other categories of information, should be public, as long as the personal data is redacted. Estonian public sector has mainly disregarded this requirement and the public part of registers that contain personal data have been left unpublished, to say nothing of their presentation in a reusable form.

      The options for re-using public data from registers that contain personal data are modest.

      Estonian open data is scattered in institutions. The most important generators of open data:

      • Land Board – geoportal: http://geoportaal.maaamet.ee

      • Environmental information centre: http://www.keskkonnainfo.ee

      • Statistics Estonia: http://pub.stat.ee/px-web.2001/dialog/statfile2.asp

      • National Library digital archives DIGAR: http://digar.nlib.ee

      • National Archive digital archive.

      Sample query to the Government Offi ce’s document register

      One route to making availability of open data simpler and better organizing presentation of open data would be the open data repository currently in pilot stage, http://opendata.riik.ee.

      Open data repository

      Uuno Vallner

      [email protected]

      Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications

      Tanel Tammet

      [email protected]

      Tallinn University of Technology

      Aleksander Reitsakas

      [email protected]

      Aktors OÜ

      To improve availability of open data and coordinate posting of open data, a pilot interface has been developed for an open data repository at http://opendata.riik.ee. Metadata for the public sector’s open data should be uploaded there. Public departments and agencies can also upload data sets here if they so choose.

      Repository for open-source data

      From the standpoint of open data, what Estonia’s

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