At Bruxelles Formation, my mission was to insert an internal database data into a promotional public website. This database information was already promoted into a more expert public website, so data publicity was not an issue.
Step 1: Promote Open Data amongst management
Open Data can be seen as a real threat for data producers. In this project, it was a manner of enhancing the promotion of the courses contained in the dataset. It was then quite easy to show the institution’s interest in opening up its data. By the end of the story, this data will be published in 5 different public websites, each using its specific selection of data.
Step 2: Define the legal framework
Which data is freely accessible? Which is not? How do we garantee our SLA? That were the questions we had to answer both with legal and IT department. We chose a Creative Common licence.
Step 3: Prepare the data to be shared
Together with the IT department and the data producers, I prepared data fields users cases, and asks to create new fields. It then led the IT department to describe each field.
Step 4: Define the sharing data format and its documentation platform
Together with the IT departement, we chose a JSON as API format and Redoc as a documentation platform.
Step 5: Promote the data
As requested by local politics, I promoted this Open Data API to the Regional platform.
Step 6: Maintain data quality
The database content is maintained daily by the data producers. A yearly meeting is planned for the data quality to be checked up.
Conclusion
This Open data project was quite simple: I had to deal with only one source of data. For another project, I had to combine different sources of data, and it got tricky with semantic interconnection (new blogpost to come).