Federal Office of Metrology and Surveying (BEV)
“We want to promote the further use and processing of our spatial data at both national and international level. After all, this results in a high benefit for the economy and society. This is why the BEV has created the necessary technical infrastructure with the portal data.bev.gv.at so that the data of the BEV can be used accordingly as open data.”
Wernher Hoffmann, President, Federal office of Metrology and Surveying (BEV)
Austria’s groundbreaking new geoportal is enhancing access to data for all stakeholders by following the FAIR principles with standardised interfaces.
The geoportal at data.bev.gv.at has been developed by the Austrian Federal Office of Metrology and Surveying (BEV) to implement the legal framework on open data and re-use of public sector information.
It breaks new ground in different aspects and follows a distributed cloud strategy for the provision of BEV geospatial data. All data on the platform are published according to the Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 licence with standardised formats and interfaces, which thoroughly support FAIR principles in a transparent way.
For the platform itself, the open source product Geonetwork enables a mutual interaction between the developing open source community and the requirements of BEV. For example, this resulted in an interface stabilisation of the DataCite connector for Digital Object Identifier (DOI). The DOI supports a semantic classification and correlation within the given metadata.
Benefits
- Enhances security using the distributed cloud strategy and relieves the infrastructure from download peaks.
- Supports a common understanding of rights and obligations when using the data thanks to the Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 licence which follows legal regulations.
- Increases economic efficiency by reducing duplication of effort through the mutual development of the geoportal software - common requirements are implemented once and many be adopted to varying needs of different stakeholders, which again are used by the whole community.
- Embedding of the DataCite DOI allows for a clear, transparent and sustainable addressing of datasets in an increasing data lake.