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a wide range of datasets including communal boundaries in Switzerland, population statistics, current weather data, historical documents and a directory of Swiss literature.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.

Once you have decided a publication route, you can start publishing open data. This is done in most cases directly on opendata.swiss. If you wish to publish geographic data, this happens via geo.admin.ch. Once you have selected your publication option, you need to upload the metadata.

As explained in the “Preliminary legal checks” section, there is normally a legal framework setting out the conditions under which a dataset from the public administration can be used. Laws and ordinances are often difficult for users of the data to understand. The large number of laws also means it is far from simple to maintain an overview.