JeDEM 6(1): 69-79, 2014

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2. Open Data Trentino Overview
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The Open Data Trentino project was created under the push of the local government of opening
their public information as expressed in the guidelines for the reuse of public data official document
(DGP, 2012). From the legal point of view, the process started with the adoption of the Provincial
Law no. 16/2012 (LP 16/2012), on the promotion of the information society and the digital
administration and for the distribution of free software and open data formats.
The process continued by adapting and improving, for the local administration context, the state
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of the art of existing European good practices in matter of Public Sector Information (PSI) . The
result was the drafting of the Open Data Guidelines (Resolution 2858/2012).
The data hunting and publication process followed is a step by step, day by day, federated
approach by involving the local authorities since the beginning by asking to every provincial
department to open at least one dataset. Although the direct engagement of any department is
time consuming it has proved of being successful and brought the desired side effect of creating
enough awareness to the whole public administration and to spread the change paradigm. Many
aspects are involved in this process: from the data cleaning to the data modelling, from the privacy
issues to the intellectual property rights, from the dissemination aspects to the process design. At
the same time, we have focused at the creation of the Data as a Culture, by acting in several
dissemination and educative actions internally to the institution and with a broader scope at the
national and international level.
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The Dati Trentino portal is built over CKAN , an open source data management system started
by the Open Knowledge Foundation and maintained by the CKAN community itself. CKAN is
specifically designed to allow programmatic access, finding and retrieval of dataset metadata
through web APIs to which we are currently contributing. For instance we developed dedicated
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clients to access datasets in two different programming languages. The first one, Ckan Api client ,
is an open source Python based library used to add automatically harvested datasets into a
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standard CKAN platform version 2.2. The second one, called Jackan , is an open source Java
based lightweight library with built-in support for provenance tracking to easily access the
catalogue data from Java.
As of October 2014, the government of the PAT published about 860 datasets in a catalogue
made available under the link http://dati.trentino.it more than a year ago, with an open license for
ensuring free and unlimited use and reuse of data, representing the engagement of about 60
provincial departments. The catalogue is clustered into 13 broad categories, each consisting of a
number of datasets, which are represented as one or more resources that are easily accessible
and downloadable often in CSV and/or JSON format, and occasionally in XML. Each dataset can
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be mapped to DCAT , a vocabulary designed for describing catalogues and datasets thereof for
increasing interoperability. Just to cite a few of the published resources of high importance, there
are provincial budget and cadastre.
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As shown by the result published by Dati.Gov.It , as we write, the Province of Trento is the most
performing catalogue in Italy in terms of number of published dataset, which confirm that the

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http://www.provincia.tn.it/progetto_open_data (in Italian)

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“Libro bianco per il riutilizzo dell’informazione del settore pubblico”, EVPSI Project (2012),
http://www.evpsi.org/evpsifiles/bianco_beta.pdf;
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CKAN Platform, http://ckan.org

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Ckan API Client, git.io/ckan-api-client

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Jackan, https://github.com/opendatatrentino/jackan

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http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/

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http://www.dati.gov.it/content/infografica

CC: Creative Commons License, 2014.