Identify

Open Government Data is data from the public administration that is made available for secondary use by anyone interested, free of charge and ideally in machine-readable form. The Swiss OGD portal opendata.swiss contains a wide range of datasets including communal boundaries in Switzerland, population statistics, current weather data, historical documents and a directory of Swiss literature. The data are often made available as complete datasets which can be reused or combined by users to create applications and visualizations that reveal new connections between existing data.

In order to publish OGD, you need to know what data your organization holds. Ideally, you will have an inventory of all datasets in your organization. However, this is not absolutely necessary. Start by identifying just the datasets that are most often requested and may already have been published. If you wish to compile a complete inventory of your data collections afterwards, you can find further information here.

Depending on the size of your organization, compiling an inventory of your data is a recommended tool for publishing OGD but not a requirement. A data inventory gives you an overview of the available data and makes it easier to identify those that are suitable for OGD. However, there is no reason not to publish individual datasets on opendata.swiss.