Danish entrepreneurs: take note that Denmark has now released basic public data able to be used freely to be build commercial products on top of. The information includes various core information about individuals, businesses, real properties, buildings, addresses, and more.
This seems to be a trend occuring in the region. Finland offers public geographic data, and last March we covered Estonia doing the same.
A press release from Denmark’s Finansmisteriet says the data will include:
“the most important information about businesses, cadastral registers, maps and buildings, and it will establish a new register of property owners of real property (Register of Property Owners). At a later stage, modernisation can be expanded to include e.g. personal data, data on incomes, road infrastructure, and the financial statements of businesses.”
Previously businesses had to buy data from the public authority, which is a big mental and financial barrier for anyone looking to provide services for Danes. Denmark did make available real estate information publicly available in 2002, which they say was a great success and has increased transparency and competition in the Danish real estate market.
In total, this means that businesses will not have to collect data themselves when their tax money has already paid for public data collection. For the public, this will provide less need for re-entering data in online self-service solutions (especially in healthcare applications), when forms are filled in automatically with relevant and fully up-to-date basic data.
This release of data is a part of Denmark’s eGOVERNMENT strategy. Once the initiatives have been fully implemented by 2020, revenues for society are expected to be approx. DKK 800 million annually.
“When the data has been released it can be used to develop completely new types of digital products, solutions, and services, which will benefit our companies as well as society at large. It is a vital part of Denmark’s digital raw material that we are now releasing, which will create growth and jobs in Denmark,” said Ole Sohn Danish Minister for Business and Growth.
