TIMELINE

1989 National Land Survey’s Antti Rainio writes in the journal Maankäyttö: ”Information should not be priced with a view to the clients who can pay the most, because the smaller marginal benefits will then be lost. “If the data has been produced, we have to ensure all the possible benefits for the economy by using it.”

2001 “The Semantic Web”, an article by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, is published in the Scientific American magazine.

2004 Publication of first Finnish version of Creative Commons, a licence suitable for open data licensing.

2006 The first verifiable mention of the term ‘open data’ in Finland is made during a lecture by Matt Biddulph.

June 2007 The British government publishes the report Power of Information on the benefits of sharing information.

2008 Many open data advocates make first contact with each other in the Open Research Swarm channel on Jaiku, the predecessor of Twitter. The virtual research community experiments with new collaboration methods and the utilisation of social media in research.

April 2009 Peter Corbett visits Helsinki and tells his audience about the Apps for Democracy project organised in Washington DC.

May 2009 The US government’s data.gov -data catalogue is launched.

4 June 2009 The first Datanavaustalkoot open data workshop is posted as an event on Facebook. ”Join us and share your know-how and contacts related to opening data.”

June 2009 The vision for regional data (“Helsingin seudun seututietovisio 2020”) proposes to launch the Helsinki Region Infoshare project to promote the openness of information.

1 October 2009 The first winner of the Apps4Finland competition is announced at the MindTrek conference. The Tax Tree visualisation draws deserved attention.

November 2009 A report by Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA proposes the opening up of public sector data resources free of charge to the public.

November 2009 An interface to the data of the popular Helsinki region Journey Planner is opened to the public.

November 2009 Forum Virium Helsinki is assigned to prepare a project plan for Helsinki Region Infoshare.

January 2010 The data catalogue of the of the British government,data.gov.uk, is published.

February 2010 Memo by ETLA (Research Institute of the Finnish Economy): “Data is a source of revenue for public administration. This is a barrier for opening up information.”

March 2010 Public Data – an introduction to opening information resources by Antti Poikola, Petri Kola and Kari A. Hintikka is published.

11 March 2010 Founder of Open Knowledge Foundation Rufus Pollock visits the Open Up the City event in Helsinki.
March 2010 A group of experts recommends better access to public data sets in a report to the Ministry of Education.
1 April 2010 The British Geological Survey opens its map data.

June 2010 The City Boards of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area approve the HRI project. Ville Meloni starts as Project Manager.

June 2010 As the first public European libraries, the libraries of the Helsinki Metropolitan area open up the metadata of 680 000 works, accessible to anyone in raw data form.

22 June 2010 Government Programme: “Government will make decisions which enable the opening and free availability of publicly owned data without compromising data security.”

July 2010 First data opening via HRI: 300 tables of the Statistical Yearbook of Helsinki 2009 are released as open data.

September 2010 Pekka Vuori starts as HRI Project Manager at the City of Helsinki Urban Facts.

14 September 2010 Ministry of Finance grants 205,000 euro from its inter-municipal cooperation funds to the HRI project.

12 October 2010 DataSuomi, Parliament interface and LiveInfoBoard are the winners of the second Apps4Finland competition.

November 2010 Launch of the HRI project website.

4 December 2010 The InternationalOpen Data Hackathon event takes place in about sixty cities around the world, including Helsinki. http://vimeo.com/17477945

10 December 2010 The Helsinki region statistics (Aluesarjat) are exported to HRI.

30 December 2010 The alpha version of the HRI web service is published at data.hri.fi for internal development use.

1 January 2011 The National Land Survey opens up its place names dataset and topographic with broad rights of use.

21 January 2011 The newspaper Helsingin Sanomat releases its first open data set on Finnish book publishers.

3 March 2011 The Finnish Government takes a decision-in-principle concerning the accessibility of the digital data reserves of the public administration: “Data reserves should be openly available and reusable with coherent, clear and equal terms of use, and where possible, free of charge.”

14 March 2011 The first Finnish data journalism workshop, HS Open, is organised by Helsingin Sanomat and is open to all. The material is public data, and the participants are journalists, graphic designers and coders.

18 March 2011 Web service www.hri.fi is opened and the HRI project officially launched at the City Hall. The event is hosted by Mayor Jussi Pajunen.

18 March 2011 HRI releases an extensive set of map data of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. It allows the visualization of 20 different phenomena at different geographic levels.

12 May 2011 The results of Helsinki Region Transport’s (HRT) mobile apps contest are announced. The six winners have been chosen among a total of 60 competition entries.

16 May 2011 Public broadcaster Yle releases its first open data set as a Google Doc. This consists of the parliamentary candidates’ responses on the Yle News voting advice application.

7 June 2011 The collection data containing more than 3,000,000 works in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area libraries is published in open interface.

17 June 2011 Nomen Est Omen, an application by FloApps analysing people’s surnames from public databases wins second prize in the international Open Data Challenge. The challenge had four categories and received a total of 430 entries.

22 June 2011 New Government Programme: “Data resources produced with public funds will be opened for the use of citizens and businesses.”

30 June–1 July 2011 The prospect of founding Open Knowledge Foundation Finland is discussed for the first time at the Open Knowledge Conference 2011 Berlin.http://2011.okcon.org

30 June 2011 The Finnish State Railways VR makes an interface to the Junat kartalla(Trains on a Map) service, with near-real-time train traffic information, available for use by the Apps4Finland participants. They are encouraged to develop applications that would be useful for train passengers.

July 2011 Hami Kekkonen joins the HRI team as Project Coordinator.

16 August 2011 The financial statements of Finnish municipalities from 2008 to 2010 are published through HRI.

September 2011 The Open Data Kitchen and data cooking events are organised in Amsterdam. A master’s thesis is written about the HRI project (“Managing and developing innovation networks”).

26 September 2011 Forum Virium Helsinki and IBM organise an open workshop about data visualisation and city data as part of the Smarter Cities Challenge programme.

4 October 2011 First mobile app making use of VR’s real-time data is launched. The Ajoissa (“On Time”) application, developed by Geosaaga, allows you to monitor whether trains keep up with their schedules.http://www.ajoissa.fi/

1 November 2011 The seminar Avoin data, avain uuteen (“Open Data, Key to Renewal”) gathers top researchers from various fields of science to discuss the impact of the open availability of research data on their research.

3 November 2011 The National Land Survey proposes to cease to collect licence fees from the users of its Topographic Database. In order to make the data available free of cost, the decree on the NLS fees needs to be changed.

21 November 2011 The budget department of the Ministry of Finance rejects the proposal for the free sharing of NLS’s topographic data.

22 November 2011 A record 140 entries are submitted to the 2011 Apps4Finlandcompetition. The winner of the Visualisation category is “Helsinki Public Transport Visualized” by Lauri Vanhala (featured on the cover of this publication).

31 November 2011 The first Open Knowledge Suomi Meetup is organised for the open knowledge community and networks.

1 December 2011 The population data covering the entire Helsinki Metropolitan Area, building stock and land reserve data are published in 500 x 500 m squares.

13 December 2011 A communique by the EU commission calculates that the benefits of unlocking data could amount to 140 billion euro.

14 December 2011 HRI releases the 2000–2010 locations of traffic accidents in Helsinki and accident types as spatial data sets.

21 December 2011 The Cabinet Finance Committee allows the National Land Survey to release its base maps and aerial photos for free for citizens and businesses to use.

21 December 2011 The 2009 and 2010 financial statements of the City of Helsinki are released on HRI.

21 January 2012 The IBM Smarter CitiesChallenge report gives recommendations for developing Helsinki with the help of open data.

25 January 2012 Statistics Finland grants a worldwide perpetual reuse licence to all data published in its cost-free statistical databases, both for commercial and non-commercial purposes.

30 January 2012 A three-week outdoor advertisement campaign (“Ta-da! Data”) promotes public awareness about data visualisation.

31 January 2012 The European Commission chooses to use the same data catalogue technology (CKAN) as HRI.

4 February 2012 The Invisible City seminar and workshops at Korjaamo in Helsinki. Themes of the event are open knowledge, visual planning and smart city. The occasion is part of the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 programme.

9 February 2012 A working group nominated by the Ministry of Finance proposes that standard electronic transfer of data between public authorities for official needs is henceforth cost-free.

9 March 2012 One of the themes of the annual Urban Research Days in Helsinki is “open data, open city”: the digital dimension of urban research.

March 2012 Service Map of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area receives a new interface and its data content is expanded.

13 March 2012 Awarded in the Apps4Finland competition, the Finnish company Neligrate also receives the prestigious business award granted by the Swedish Anders Wall Foundation.

22 March 2012 Government statement: “The Government will open up public data reserves systematically and without delay for the citizens and businesses to utilise. This is expected to generate a growth impulse for new business based on the strong expertise in the software industry, among other things.”

20 March 2012 The metadata of the HRI web service is released.

23 March 2012 A long-time advocate of open data, Antti Rainio from the National Land Survey is named the most influential IT person of the year.

16 April 2012 The AHJO workshop gathers a few dozen officials and application developers to discuss opening up the data of Helsinki’s case management system. All the data of the city’s decision-making process are stored in Ahjo, item by item.

20 April 2012 The economic data of the City of Vantaa is published through the HRI service. These are Excel files with upwards of 100,000 rows, from acquisitions worth a few euro all the way to the 180-million-euro specialist health care service agreement.

27 April 2012 The Finnish Verokuitti (“Tax Receipt”) application becomes a candidate for an international journalism award.

28 April 2012 The Data Journalism Handbook is launched online, free of cost

9 May 2012 The open data download service of the National Land Survey is opened.

10 May 2012 The City of Helsinki organizes an initial meeting with the application developers interested in the data reserves of the city.

21 May 2012 As the first Finnish media to do so, the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat establishes a data journalism desk.

21 May 2012 Helsingin Sanomat begins to publish the background material of its polls as open data.

10 September 2012 Yle’s investigative journalism programme MOT releases a comprehensive summary of government subsidies received by companies operating in Finland in 1997–2012. The data contains business support grants worth more than 5 billion euro.

15 September 2012
http://data-cuisine.net/
– real cooking with open data!

21 September 2012 The Datavaalit (“Data Election”) project begins to collect a permanent database of elections held in Finland.

17–22 September 2012 The largest open knowledge event in the world, Open Knowledge Festival, gathers more than a thousand visitors from a hundred countries to Helsinki.
http://www.hri.fi/fi/ajankohtaista/hrin-open-knowledge-festival-tarpit/

28 September 2012 HRI releases guidelines on legal issues for public bodies planning to release data.

October 2012 First open data pilot training is organised for the municipal staff of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area.

2 October 2012 HRI’s finance data workshop offers tools for understanding the City of Vantaa open economic data.

20–21 October 2012 HRI’s open data cooking stand attracts new audiences to open data at the Wärkfest Do-It-Yourself festival at Helsinki’s Cable Factory.

11 October 2012 Helsinki wins the award for best e-governance in the Open City category of the World e-Governments Organization competition.

23 October 2012 City of Espoo opens up its solar and geoenergy maps.

31 October 2012 Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (Tekes) organises an event to brainstorm new business implementations for open data.

6 November 2012 Geodata association ProGIS grants HRI an honourable mention for developing the field of spatial data in Finland.

20 November 2012 HRI is awarded with the Mayor of Helsinki’s Achievement of the Year 2012 prize.

4 December 2012 The winners of the Apps4Finland 2012 competition include BlindSquare and Datavaalit (“Data Election”). The open API for monitoring the energy consumption of private homes was awarded in the Best Idea category.

12 December 2012 The data catalogue of the city of Jyväskylä is opened at data.jyvaskyla.fi.

20 December 2012 The first data release of the Tax Administration, containing 300,000 rows of corporate tax data paid in 2011, is published via the HRI data catalogue.

21 December 2012 Open Knowledge Finland foundation is established. Founding members included 64 individuals and 17 organizations.

22 December 2012 The city of Tampere launches an open data website, www.tampere.fi/avoindata

19 February 2013 Helsinki’s new electronic feedback system contains an interface allowing the city to receive feedback and delegate it directly to the appropriate department. The first client to make use of the interface is the newspaper Metro with its “Pitäiskö fiksata” (“Time to Fix This?”) web service.

28 February 2013 The Finnish Meteorological Institute opens a beta version of its download service:http://ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/avoin-data-beta
Weather data was opened during summer 2013.

28 February 2013 1,000 data sets have been opened on the www.hri.fi web service.

18 March 2013 he case management system of the City of Helsinki, Ahjo, is equipped with an open interface. The decision-making documents now exist as open data, accessible to all.

29 April 2013
The 2-year birthday of the HRI web service is celebrated!