Accounts payable as open data
A standardized way of publishing information about accounts payable (sv: leverantörsreskontra) as open data. The specification and the data published using it is open and free to use, aimed primarily at the public sector. We hope this will make it easier to compare purchase patterns and trends.
Background
The goal of the project is to deliver a standardized way of creating product specifications primarily for municipalities. Municipalities usually hold part of the national dataset in a given area and common specifications for data are needed in order for external users to compare data between organisations and creating national services.
We achieved this by working with two different datasets: accounts payable and municipal health inspections of kitchens. The experience gained from this will be the basis for the recommended workflow of similar future projects.
The specification was developed as part of a project run by the association Sambruk, a collaboration between about 100 municipalities. The project was financed by Vinnova, the innovation agency of Sweden.
An earlier similar project is another Vinnova-financed one concerning open meal information where the basic workflow was tested for the first time. That project involved only one municipality and was thus much simpler to run. One conclusion drawn from this project is the importance of involving the stakeholders in the organisations affected by the opening of data, a strategy therefor reused while working on this follow up-project.
License
All data available via the specification is published under Creative Commons Zero, which give the consumer of the data full rights to modify the data and use it for any purpose (even commercial). This is in accordance with the recommendations in the Swedish national guidelines :”För databaser som endast skyddas enligt det särskilda databasskyddet (men som inte fritt får återges enligt 26 a §) rekommenderas i stället licensen CC0.”