Written answers

Thursday, 14 February 2013

Department of Public Expenditure and Reform

Public Sector Reform Implementation

Photo of Michael MoynihanMichael Moynihan (Cork North West, Fianna Fail)
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To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the progress he has made with regard to implementing the plan Supporting Public Service Reform - eGovernment 2012 – 2015; in particular the progress he has made on publishing appropriate data in a way that will facilitate re-use; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [7839/13]

Photo of Brendan HowlinBrendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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Since eGovernment 2012-2015 was launched in April 2012, my Department has been promoting awareness of the content of the Strategy, through bilateral meetings with Public Bodies to agree approaches to progressing and reporting on actions in the Strategy. My Department has also organised a series of events promoting elements of the Strategy, and will arrange further events during 2013. One of these events, co-hosted on 22 November 2012 with Dublinked, focussed on Open Data.

The specific implementation of the actions set out in the Strategy, including publishing appropriate data in a way that will facilitate re-use, are the responsibility of each Department and agency. To facilitate easier reporting by Public Bodies a new website, e.gov.ie, was launched on 23 January 2013. A first progress report under eGovernment 2012-2015 will be submitted to Government by the end of the first quarter of this year. I intend to make this report publicly available.

In advance of the progress report being completed, I am pleased to note that a huge amount of public data is being published and that organisations are actively working to ensure that this data is re-usable.

Examples of how public data is being published and re-used include: the cooperation between the Central Statistics Office and the All-Ireland Research Observatory (AIRO) to provide the public with a new set of mapping tools to allow users to take advantage of the massive amount of census data that is available; the Irish Spatial Data Exchange (ISDE) which allows users to search for data or data services from multiple participating Public Bodies; the National Transport Authority’s Journey Planner which contains all public transport route and timetable information across all public transport providers; the fixyourstreet.ie facility which allows citizens to report faults to their local authorities. An application programming interface (API) is available and is being used by interested groups; and Oireachtas debates are published in both PDF and machine-readable formats.

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