Norway’ Brønnøysundregistrene (Brønnøysund Register Centre), the government agency managing many of the country’s public registers and digital information exchange systems, is developing a semantic catalogue which it will make available as open source software in autumn. The tools are intended for Norway’s public sector, that can use them to for task involving public and not-public datasets.
The catalogue tools will include descriptions of quality, security and content of the data, says David Norheim, Special Director Information Management at the Brønnøysund Register Centre. The tools are built according to DCAT-AP-NO, Norway’s implementation of the catalogue standard for data portals.
Norway’s Register Centre is responsible for managing nearly 20 of the country’s main registries, including for businesses, non-profit organisations, bankruptcies, marriage settlements and licensed hunters.
Brønnøysundregistrene is using the open source Elasticsearch search engine. In addition, the developers are strongly considering to use the Apache Jena Fuseki, a set of tools that helps software developers to build semantic web interfaces.
In the autumn, the centre will publish its code on Github once it has decided on the appropriate license and set-up the management organisation. “We will most likely use a permissive licence, such as the BSD, MIT or Apache licence”, Mr Norheim says.
The Register Centre’s software development project is co-funded by Difi, Norway’s Agency for Public Management and eGovernment with NKR 9,490,000 (about EUR 1,000,000).