Presentation of Opening up City of Helsinki Case Management Solution (AHJO) by Ville Meloni from Forum Virium Helsinki at OKFestival 2012 in Helsinki, Finland

1. Opening up City of Helsinki Case Management
Solution (AHJO)
Ville Meloni - Forum Virium Helsinki
Open Knowledge Festival – 18th of September 2012
HACK Workshop 1

2. Background
• City of Helsinki wants to serve citizens and developers
better by opening access to decision making information.
• Earlier the city has taken case management solution
called AHJO in use. It is being used by city decision
making bodies.
• AHJO renders HTML-pages for city of Helsinki hel.fi
website as human readable documents. Now machine
readable output as open data is in the works.
• Basically opening data in AHJO means regular XML
dumps. In the future possibly also programming layers.

3. Helsinki Region Infoshare - Overview
“Making urban and regional information quickly and easily
accessible to all. The information can be used freely at no cost”
To develop a To build a web
network of service through
information owners which the data can
who maintain and be easily found,
open their data accessed and
following common utilised.
guidelines.
To pilot an open data
Provide information as machine activity model and its
readable ”raw data” which is easy to implications to both the
utilize in various applications and producers and end users of
web-services. the data.

4. Timeline, financing, implementation
Timeline
2010-2012 (pilot)
2012- (on-going function)
Financing Implementation
•Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, •Directive board
Kauniainen •City of Helsinki Urban
•Finnish innovation fund Facts
(Sitra) •Forum Virium Helsinki
•Ministry of Finance
Collaboration with many different organisations to open data i.e.
government, other municipalities, municipal organizations, etc.
Collaboration between data producers and developers using that data!
15.11.12 Forum Virium Helsinki 4

5. www.hri.fi open data catalogue
Easy to find, access and
utilize data
•Maintaining of the metadata.
Actual data is hosted
elsewhere.
•A channel for data users to
give feedback and request
new data.
•Brings visibility to existing
data pools and encourages
more usage.
•Concrete instructions for
agencies on how to open
data

6. Scope of HRI open data
1. Statistics and estimates
– Urban phenomenon: demographics,
employment, housing, commuting,
etc.
– Geographical granularity: municipal,
district, grid-level, etc.
1. Geospatial data
– Data that supports presentation of
statistical and other data on a map,
i.e. district-level shapefiles.
1. Any other data
– Public services, financials, mass-
transportation, infrastructure, decision
making related data, etc.

7. Opening AHJO – Story so far
Autumn 2011 Winter 2011 Spring 2012 Summer 2012 Autumn 2012
• Reseach on city • HRI starts to • HRI organizes • City gives OK • Meetings to
decision making work with the city a developer to create first fine tuning
document of Helsinki to workshop at API as an XML- and
managing systems drive opening of Forum Virium XML-dump file publishing
by Antti Poikola for AHJO Helsinki to get as proposed in details
data journalism • Helsinki gives input to the developer • Target is to
event green light for opening of workshop have first
• http://muistio.tieke.fi/ahjo
experimentation AHJO • Tieto creates version of API
• Meetings with city • First internal • www.hri.fi first version of (daily XML-
of Helsinki XML-test dump /fi/ajankohtaist XML-dump dump files) on
administration and is created by a/helsingin- method a public server
communications AHJO’s IT- paatosasiakirj • City IT starts as open data
integrator Tieto ojen- looking for in autumn
corporation avaaminen- hosting • Engaging
kehittajille/ solution to developers to
• www.hri.fi/fi/ke AHJO (and further develop
skustelut/helsi other) open the open data
ngin- data API
paatoksenteon
-avaaminen/

8. Example of a
related city web
service:
Helsinkikanava.fi
– City council
videos on the
web…

9. open.helsinkikanava.fi
• …as open
data
• City
decision
making
related open
data service
• Provides
REST-API
to city
council
videos +
metadata of
city council
meetings

11. Examples of existing end-user
services that could utilize AHJO
open data Kansanmuisti.fi
•Comparing representative’s
election campaign statements
against actual parliamentary
decisions
Punakyna.net
•Enables commenting and social media
sharing of city decisions
•Currently containing city of Tampere

12. Future
Decision making data + geo-coding +
financial data + city project data + city
infrastructure data + external data +
analytics + visualizations = hopefully some
useful services for communications and
participation enhancing democracy

13. Next
• Insides of AHJO XML and open data
publishing presented by Tieto corporation

14. Thank you!
www.hri.fi
www.facebook.com/helsinkiregioninfoshare
@HRInfoshare
semantic.hri.fi
Slideshare.net/helsinkiregioninfoshare
Ville Meloni
Forum Virium Helsinki
Projektipäällikkö
ville.meloni@forumvirium.fi
www.forumvirium.fi
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nney/139447386/sizes/z/in/photostream
/