TechVirtuoso

Edmonton, Canada has rolled out their open government program using Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) solution, and is working with them to develop an website that will give citizens and developers easier access to information and suggest ideas that enhance public infrastructure and services. The city’s program uses open source components along with Windows Azure. The use of open standards and application programming interfaces lets local developers and the city’s IT staff easily retrieve data for use in online applications or mashups.

According to Port 25, “Microsoft announced the OGDI initiative in May 2009, with the goal of reducing the cost of publishing government data while simplifying data access by leveraging cloud computing and open standards, which is exactly what has been achieved with Edmonton.”

More information on OGDI can be found here. You can also download the OGDI “starter kit” over at Microsoft Codeplex.