Bavaria goes ‘open bydata’ with a new open data portal

Bavaria, the German state best known for ‘laptops and lederhosen’, makes open data a priority. With its new Digital Plan, the State Ministry for Digital Affairs aims to motivate Bavarian public administrations to share their open data and thus increase transparency and foster open data reuse. To achieve this aim, it is developing, together with a specialised open data team, a new state-of-the-art open data portal.

In May 2023, the team launched the first version of the new portal. Now, with the second version that brands the portal as ‘open bydata’, Bavaria wants to make open data even more of a success story.

We had the opportunity to ask some questions about the new version of open bydata to Luis Moßburger. He is the Product Owner Open Data at ‘byte’, the Bavarian digital agency responsible for establishing the portal.

Why is the portal called ‘open bydata’?

It’s wordplay. The abbreviation for Bavaria (German: Bayern) is ‘BY’ and our portal provides ‘open BY (Bavarian) data’. With the portal, Bavaria is becoming ‘open by data’. As such, it seeks to provide transparency and openness by sharing data freely for everyone.

What is new about open bydata?

At byte, we believe in user-centred and agile product development. In May 2023, we launched a ‘minimum viable product’ – a first version. It was functional, but there was a lot of room for improvement. With the second version, we addressed many of its limitations. For example, we now have better search and filter functionalities, dataset recommendations and a 'SPARQL API' that allows users to query our database directly. The layout and the usability and quality of metadata were improved. We also have proper branding, with our own name and logo. And these are just a few of the enhancements.

We are especially proud of the ‘open data areas’ for data providers. Many cities, for example, do not want or need an own open data portal. With the ‘open data areas’, they can now get their own, individually branded area as part of open bydata. This keeps their costs and effort low and provides us with data from that city – a win-win situation!

By the way, did you know that open bydata uses ‘piveau‘, the same software that is used to run data.europa.eu?

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The new ‘open bydata’ open data portal for Bavaria.

Are public administrations interested in becoming ‘open by data’?

I would say yes. Many cities and public authorities want to become part of our network and are keen to share their open data. Of course, some need more convincing than others. We offer very strong arguments to show that sharing data has many advantages for public administrations: the data can be used to boost the economy, research and civil engagement; administrations become more transparent; and last but not least, their datasets are distributed EU-wide through data.europa.eu. All of these allow them to stay relevant in our data-driven society.

We see that administrations greatly appreciate the ability to get help at any moment from our dedicated open data team. Often, a quick chat about publishing and reusing data is all that is needed to turn a civil servant into a strong advocate for opening up their data.

Now that the second version is in place, what are your next goals?

Our vision is a better Bavaria by data: easy, trustworthy, connected. To reach this goal, we have set ourselves three focus areas. Firstly, to strengthen the (open) data competence in the public administration, in order to enable publishing, distributing and reuse of data. Secondly, connect different data sources with each other and with the knowledge of the world by following the principles of linked open data. And lastly, to actively seek collaboration with open data communities from civil society, the economy, research, journalism and in the administration itself to generate real value with open data.

As a librarian, I am convinced that besides these communities, libraries are also strong partners in reaching these goals, as they have broad expertise in data quality and management, along with semantic enrichment of data.

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The team behind 'open bydata', from left to right: Patryk Brzoza, Kai Wanschura, Luis Moßburger, Julian Grote.

What do you see as the biggest challenges ahead?

As it is important for us to provide ever more and better data, we want to make the process for administrations to share their data as simple as possible. To achieve this, we offer individual consulting and aim to use automatic data harvesting instead of relying on manual exports and workflows. In addition, the quality of (meta)data is vital: to improve this, we are working on (semi-)automatically improving the content of our portal.

We will also keep working on improving the user experience of our portal. And we are reinforcing the open data team – more people will join us and our service portfolio will steadily grow.

In the end, our big final goal is to link as many Bavarian data as possible. With all that on the roadmap, we are making Bavaria ‘open by data’.

Are you interested in learning more? Do you want to use our data or become part of our network? We’d love to chat: please send us an email to openbydata@byte.bayern and feel free to give us feedback at https://open.bydata.de. You also find us through data.europa.eu, the official portal for European data, managed by the Publications office of the EU.