ID: 104

COCHARD, Jean –Luc

Curriculum

Master and PhD in Computer Science - EPFL (Switzerland) 15 years in academic research on natural language processing and speech recognition 4 years as R6D manager by a telco in charge of implementing speech-enabled self-services 3 years as managing director of a start-up company deploying speech-enabled self-services 2 years as international sales manager of a company deploying contact-center solutions 6 years as managing director of an SME active in the microelectronic sector Now, head of the IT unit of the Swiss Federal Archives, and co-project leader of the "OGD Swiss" project

Title:	Open Archives for Open Data – the example of Switzerland
Brief summary:	Since 14 September 2013 the Swiss Federal Archives have been operating the Swiss open data pilot portal opendata.admin.ch. How was the pilot portal created, what does it offer and most of all, how does the operation of an OGD portal fit into the tasks of an archive?
Content:	The opendata.admin.ch pilot portal was the product of a cooperation between various agencies which have extensive experience of supplying data and documents from their respective specialist fields. The initial motivation was to provide simple and central access to the data. With this goal in mind the agencies, led by the Swiss Federal Archives, created an open government data (OGD) pilot portal within the space of nine months. The portal has helped the agencies involved to gather experience with OGD that has been integrated into the political process which began only after the pilot portal had been initiated. But what role do archives play within open government data? And how does this role fit into classic archival work? Firstly, the early and active integration of archives into OGD networks allows the centralisation of data (inventory) and simplifies the transfer of data into the archive, for example by standardising metadata. This principle is already been used in the records management process in the Swiss administration. Secondly, the difference between actively used and archived information is progressively disappearing. Data that has been gathered remains of interest to users for a long period of time and has therefore still to be available and compatible with the most recent software. In the context of geodata this is referred to as “long-term availability”. This intermediate stage between active management and archiving opens up new perspectives for archives by giving access to new target groups. For their part, data owners benefit by being both producers and consumers of their data (“prosumers”). The ultimate goal for the archive is to guarantee preservation and, at the same time, uninterrupted access to data produced by the administration.
Scientific contribution:	The contribution of this paper is more about strategy and opportunity than about real scientific contribution.
Keywords:	digital records, metadata, opendata,