The City of Oulu is releasing the source code and the architecture documentation for its e-Government platform, the OmaOulu municipal portal.
The portal will be made public as open source today, during a conference on IT in the public administration in Helsinki, says Teppo Kuisma, project officer at the Finnish IT services firm Ixonos, which built the portal. "We will use the GPL licence for some parts and the MIT licence for others."
Making the application available as open source is meant to help create a national standard for e-Government platforms, explains Ixonos in a statement. "We hope this will contribute to the development of electronic government services and that it will promote cooperation between municipalities."
The OmaOulu municipal portal and its electronic transaction architecture model are based on open source applications and open architecture solutions, sais Ixonos. "These are very practical tools for public administrations."
The OmaOulu municipal portal is built on top of the open source Liferay Portal application. Oulu city is running its portal on Red Hat GNU/Linux, the Jboss application server, the Apache web server and the MySQL database.
One example of a processes in the OmaOulu portal is the integration with Netposti, which offers an electronic alternative to a physical mailbox. Kuisma: "A main advantage of the platform is that after users log in, they are offered a range of services within a coherent user interface."
The OmaOulu municipal portal is participating on behalf of Finland in the UN World Summit Award Contest, an upcoming software contest for e-Government applications which is organised by the United Nations.
More information: