Copyright © 2013, Christophe Guéret, DANS (KNAW)/Pilot Linked Open Data project
The government of the Netherlands has a lot of data about the citizens and basic infrastructure which are contained in so-called basic registers. Through an open data policy, the content of these registers is becoming available to the citizens but having the data open does not implies that it becomes accessible right away. Those willing to use that data have to go to different places to grab it and perform some data integration on their own.
On the other hand, citizens have data that could be useful to the government, or city related services, and which is not available. Let us consider, for instance, the case of a fire in a home. The fire brigade in charge of dealing with the incident would make a great use of some detailed information about the house (e.g. the location of the valuables, the list of sleeping rooms, the presence of toxic materials) to better focus their efforts. This data is not open and should not be so to prevent its misuse, still it would be good to make it available within a given set of trusted parties
The "HuisKluis" is a concept bringing both points of view together around a central application. Through this house-centric application, citizens can:
- Get a single, harmonised, view over all the governmental data about the house
- Provide additional restricted information
- Control who gets access to the restricted information
The application uses all sort of external open data sets in addition to its own internal restricted data set
At the moment, the following open data sets are in use:
- The Linked Open Data export from Netage.nl of the basic registry of addresses and building (BAG)
- The map data from Open Street Map
- The images from the city archives
The HuisKluis is implemented as two different parts, a server and a client applications:
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Server: the server implements a RESTful API that redirect calls to other APIs. This server is implemented in Java with the RestLet and Jena libraries, it runs on the AppEngine platform from Google
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Client: the client is a Web application wrote in HTML5/CSS3/Javascript using Bootstrap, JQuery and Leaflet. The application is designed to work fine on any kind of Web-enabled device (desktop, phone, tablet, ...) running modern Web browsers
The source code of both the server and client part are open source and available on GitHub.
This application has been developed in the context of the Pilot Linked Open Data project (see the list of participants) with financial and R&D support from the Network Institute of the VU University of Amsterdam along with Data Archiving and Networking Services (DANS), an institute from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW).
Many people contributed to the source code and/or the design of the site:
- Ingrid Arcas
- Wouter Beek
- Marat Charlaganov
- Albert Meroño Peñuela
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.