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Peter Krantz‘s Opengov.se is an one-man, non-governmental initiative that aims to highlight available public datasets in Sweden. The site contains a commentable catalog of government datasets, their formats and usage restrictions. A percent figure on the front page indicates the share of datasets that are available with an open license and in at least one open format; the figure is currently 17%.
The first goal of Opengov.se is “to highlight the benefits of open access to government data and explain how this is done in practice”. A second goal is “to enable public access to the documents that constitute the government decision-making process”. A first step in this direction was launched in September 2009 with the Govtrack section, that makes it possible to browse government committee instructions. The data is scraped from the government website. The data is then linked to committees, departments, laws and European union legal acts, enabling monitoring mechanisms such as when committes are formed in a particular area. For added coolness, an API based on Google’s GData protocol enables citizens to create custom feeds.
