NijmegenSync

The municipality Nijmegen, like many other municipalities in the Netherlands, aims to provide as much data as possible to the general public. This concept is usually referred to as “open data”. One of the struggles of the municipality is the fact that its data is spread out over a great many internal (and sometimes external) systems. Because of this it is often unclear which data exists where, even for the public servants of the municipality itself.
To combat this problem the municipality has introduced a central (open) dataportal accessible via opendata.nijmegen.nl. The goal of this application is to serve as a sort of “yellow pages” for all the publicly available data of the municipality. Via this application one can search through the data of the municipality and the application will indicate which data exists where and in what system. For this setup to work, the application must know which data is present in what application. To keep this information as accurate and authentic as possible it would be preferable that this is kept up to date in an automated fashion. Manually updating these hundreds, if not thousands, of records is tedious and error-prone for humans.
To resolve these issues, an application was developed, and is continuously being developed, called NijmegenSync. This is an opensource application published on Github.com/NijmegenSync. The application is capable of harvesting data from a several internal systems of the municipality Nijmegen.  From this data, and based on this data, metadata is generated which accurately describes the data and is published automatic on opendata.nijmegen.nl. 
Furthermore, for this central system to be capable of indexing and searching through all this data, accurate and complete metadata must exist to accompany this data. For this reason, the dataportal implements the national standard for exchanging metadata of datasets, DCAT-AP-DONL 1.1. By using this standard, the municipality ensures that it can exchange its datasets with the national dataportal on data.overheid.nl and any other organization connected via the national dataportal.