NemDigitaliser

Project NemDigitaliser (literally, Easy Digitize) is a stupid name I came up with last year, and for various reasons recently returned to. It’s a stupid name because it may be confused with an official Danish government project, which it isn’t. It is, however, related very much to a specific government project: Digitaliser.dk, “a social network and tool for development, knowledge sharing and a forum for the digitisation of Denmark”, run by the National IT and Telecom Agency, ITST.

Digitaliser.dk hosts several initiatives, including:

• The Danish e-GIF (e-government interoperability framework), and
• Datakildekataloget (The Data Source Catalogue), the Danish Government’s ‘data.gov’ initiative.
• Machine-readable version of the Government Business Reference Model, FORM

Project NemDigitaliser is my ‘hands-on’ experiments with the data provided through these initiatives.

Digitaliser.dk has a REST API. I looked at it last year, where I couldn’t really crack the nut, and ended up doing some simple screen scraping instead. I recently returned to the api, and have started to understand it, I think.

The api is performancewise superior: compare screen scraping and JSON.

I’m writing up some technical notes about my experiences, so far:

• JSON and Callback
• API use cases
• Standards Catalogue API (e-GIF access)
• Data Source Catalogue API
• FORM API

I welcome comments.