When I published a LinkedIn post on Croatian open data last summer and how we use the PostgreSQL based Aranei as a data processing and profiling tool, I could not have imagined the snowball effect turning into an avalanche of reactions that was triggered by that post. Open Data is obviously a topic many people and organizations have many insights on and opinions about. The result of a relatively modest import of Croatian open data sources into our Aranei data management platform resulted in an international group of interested and helpful people. After many considerations and many more conversations, we feel that it is actually part of a triad of concepts that need to be treated holistically.

Open data cannot exist without open standards, and open standards are connected to open-source software. Open-source software is part of the technology stack for publishing open data, and there we have a nice circle. Using our fully open source stack of Aranei, consisting of PostgreSQL, PHP Symfony framework / API platform, React-Admin and many more free software components, we’ve visualized and contextualized the Open Datasets from the Croatian government, showing how much more insights can be gained about the data when normalized and correlated properly. We decided to turn our experience into a movement, called OpenDataConnected. Here we’re connecting the open data publishers, with the advocates and evangelists, and with the eventual organizations that use those open datasets.