Antoine Logean
Data Scientist in Casualty R&D at SwissRe
Founding Board Member of the Opendata.ch Association
Switzerland

Biography
Dr Antoine Logean works as data scientist in the Casualty Research & Development team at Swiss Re. He holds a PhD in Bioinformatic and Molecular Modeling and has many years experience in software engineering and data integration. As founding board member of the Opendata.ch association, he is actively involved in the promotion of the Open Data movement in Switzerland. Twitter contact: https://twitter.com/ecolix

Abstract
Open Data, GIS, and Switzerland

Where do I find the nearest pharmacy that is open right now? In which Swiss canton do I pay the heftiest health insurance premiums? How safe is my neighborhood actually? Where is the nearest quiet and green place for a short nap? What is the rail traffic density from Zurich to Bern between 7am and 8am? These questions have at least one thing in common: they all have driven the development of geo-centric open data applications by Switzerland’s open data community. Among the over 80 apps and visualizations developed by participants of Swiss Open Data hackdays, more than half focus on geographic representations of data. Apart from being an intuitive ways to represent and visualize information, maps are also a powerful way to combine and correlate datasets. What does the global trend towards Open Data mean for local geo data providers? How can GIS be a part of the Open Data revolution? What does all this community engagement mean for usage, data quality, and revenue? And what happens when public GIS professionals and civic hackers, makers and entrepreneurs come together? These are some of the questions that will be addressed during this talk.