Town open-data portal

Abstract

The main idea of this final project is to create an open-data portal (a public and free repository/catalog) where would be possible to upload all kind of data related with the town like (for example) photos, descriptions of roads (or mountain roads), results of the sports teams, old photos, data of the visitors of the museum, maps, economic data, PDF's of the local newspaper, GPS coordinates of interesting places, etc. etc. It is believed that it could be an interesting final project topic, because it requires an intense software development, go into detail about web technologies and also because in the near future it could be used as a real application. This project has been carried at the Univerza v Ljubljani (University of Ljubljana - Slovenia). It consists of an open-data portal design and development for any type of information related normally with a town, city, country, government, etc. Open Data is a global initiative where the idea is that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use, reuse and redistribute as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. The goals are similar to those of other “Open” movements such as open source, open hardware, open content, open access, etc. The basis of Open Data are transparency, collaboration, participation and generation of economic wealth. In the following pages, the requirements and objectives of the project are exposed. After that, a task planning and specification of the project phases are showed, and then an explanation of the tools and technologies that have been used for the proper development of the portal are presented. The analysis and design of the site with the main points of the development are explained. Finally, there are exposed the conclusions, future work that could be done on the application and the annex with a technical, user and administrator manual of the portal.