Tech

The French government’s open data site has undergone a facelift, according to Le Monde Informatique. Now more ergonomic and featuring more new data sets, the site wants to be the pivot for the policy to open up public data.

The in-depth revamp of the data.gouv.fr has been given a high level relaunch. The French Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault and Ministers Marylise Lebranchu and Fleur Pellerin unveiled the portal developed by Etalab.

The government has set three targets for the site, i.e.

• to enable the user to access easily the most pertinent data to respond to the questions he is asking;
• to allow any keeper of public data to share them in no time at all;
• to enhance public data due to the improvements or interpretations of people who re-use them.

Although the interface has been redesigned for better ergonomics compared with the old site which dated from 2011, it’s the content part which is benefiting from this. The portal claims it has 200 contributors of data including research centres, local authorities, representatives of collective organisations and civil society. Etalab has provided a non-comprehensive list of additional data sets, political parties accounts (2011 financial year), grants for parliamentary scrutiny (2012 financial year), number of students or lists of public contracts placed between 2008 and 2012, etc. Some work still remains to be done in some local authorities and territories to make their public data available.

The data are also more numerous – 4 times as many as the previous site, i.e. some 1.45 mn. entries. Etalab explains that this information is destined to be grouped together into series for better legibility. On the old site 350,000 files were grouped into 2,900 series. Today the site comprises 13,000 freely available data sets. The site claims to be “the social network of a community of producers and users of public interest data who are involved in improving and interpreting these data”. The collaborative aspect is therefore highlighted with the involvement of citizens in improving, grading and reusing the data.

Last week Le Monde Informatique reported that La Poste, the French Post Office, has just initiated its DataPoste programme. New services based on La Poste’s open data should see the light of day between now and the end of the first quarter of 2014.

La Poste has announced the launch of DataPoste, its open data and open innovation programme. The objective for La Post is to open up a certain number of datasets in a very short time to enable the emergence of new services designed and implemented by third parties. The target is to have the first services based on these open data available within three months.

The first stage took place on 4th December. Named DataHorizon, a private meeting of representatives from various departments of La Poste sought to define what value could be derived from such data. This entailed plotting the broad strategic outlines for opening up and adding value to the group’s data.

A second meeting will be held on 8th January. This time the group’s employees will getting together with technology start-ups, commercial partners, designers and developers. Using customer needs as a starting point, La Poste will participate in defining use scenarios, timetables for releasing data and the stages of the plan of action. Finally, the prototypes of services to meet the requirements identified in the previous stage will be developed within the scope of a “collaborative sprint” in February 2014.