University of Bern’s Open Data Show Room online with 55 open data apps

Since 2014, the Institute of Information Systems at the University of Bern has been holding the Open Data lecture, in which students learn to programme data visualisations as interactive web apps. With this year’s third edition of the course, several dozen open data apps have already been created, which until now were only accessible on the students’ personal accounts.

Now the Research Centre for Digital Sustainability, which offers the lecture, has put its own Open Data Show Room online. There the apps are published as Docker containers on a persistent URL, so that the students’ open data apps, mostly based on D3.js, keep working in the long term. In addition, the Show Room, developed with AngularJS and based on Google Material Design, offers handy filter, sort and search functions.

At present, 55 open data apps are published in the categories of education, finance, society, health, environment, transport, etc. The 2016 lecture alone produced a total of 23 apps, visualising data from the open government portal opendata.swiss, the federal administration, the City of Zurich, SBB, Bernmobil and other public bodies (see also the overview on the University of Bern website). In 2017, too, the lecture will take place at the University of Bern on Thursdays from 10 am to 12 noon and from 1 pm to 3 pm, from 23 February 2017 to 1 June 2017. The course is open to the public and can also be credited towards degree programmes at other universities.