Public administrations in Belgium are considering reusing i-Spiegel, a software solution that tests compliance of public administration information records, originally developed for municipalities in the Netherlands. The software solution lets organisations improve their data- and information management.
Flemish municipalities got interested in using the solution after being introduced to it at a conference on Open Standards for Local Governments (OSLO) in the Belgian city of Mechelen on 27 May. Over 300 Dutch municipalities use i-Spiegel and now pilots should determine if the solution will also be of use for Flemish public administrations.
Authorities in Italy and Greece have also shown interest in the tool, according to the i-Spiegel developers.
Under Dutch law, data records concerning citizens and businesses must be re-used across different government domains and organisations. For quality improvement purposes, data flaws or suspected data flaws have to be reported to the data source of the base register. To help Dutch public administrations with this, KING and VNG, two umbrella organisations for municipalities, published i-Spiegel in early 2012. In May this year, they made version 2.0 available.
Mirror magic
The software allows Dutch public administrations to measure the compliance and synchronicity of their distributed data records with base registers. i-Spiegel (Spiegel is Dutch for 'Mirror') exposes technical, process and organisational shortcomings within and between organisations. For example, i-Spiegel can map possible financial gains by not sending invoices to non-existent addresses, or by not paying social welfare to non-existent inhabitants of a municipality, who are deceased or have migrated.
KING has not yet decided on a licence for i-Spiegel version 2. The solution includes open source components such as Apache log4net, to assist in logging.
Next week, KING will present i-Spiegel to the ISA Programme, the European Commission's project on Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations. Both organisations aim to boost the uptake of Core Vocabularies - re-usable data models and vocabulary terms that can be used to describe resources. i-Spiegel includes algorithms for personal data, location and organisations.