Awesome Open Government Data Switzerland
A curated directory of Swiss Open Government Data (OGD), research, community and privately published open data, tools and learning resources. Selected European sources support comparisons with Switzerland.
OGD comes from public authorities; open data can come from any publisher. Inclusion depends on relevance, provenance and reuse rights. Non-government sources are identified in descriptions or grouped under research and community headings.
Know a useful resource? Share a link—suggestions and corrections are always welcome.
Table of Contents
Start here
Check each dataset’s license, formats and access requirements before reuse. The directory itself is published under CC0; linked resources have their own terms.
Browse by topic: Politics and votes · Legal data · Economy and employment · Health · Population · Agriculture · Energy · Housing and land · Environment and climate · Tourism · Transport · Research · Culture and archives · Procurement and official notices.
Data sources
Federal and regional OGD alongside other Swiss open data. “National” groups catalogs and thematic sources relevant to Switzerland, without implying federal publishers or nationwide coverage.
National catalogs and thematic sources
Catalogs and official statistics
- opendata.swiss — National OGD metadata catalog operated by the Federal Statistical Office (BFS/FSO). Find datasets from federal, cantonal and municipal publishers; follow each record to its downloads or services. Catalog API.
- BFS Data Portal — Overview of BFS datasets by statistical topic and access type. Use it to find spreadsheet tables, machine-readable files and API-accessible data.
- BFS Swiss Stats Explorer — Interactive explorer for BFS statistics, succeeding STAT-TAB. Use it to browse statistical data and select the dimensions needed for an analysis.
- BFS STAT-TAB — Interactive BFS tables built from selectable data cubes, with exports in several formats. Some cubes are moving to Swiss Stats Explorer; check there if a table is missing.
- I14Y metadata catalog — Metadata catalog describing Swiss data collections and interfaces. Use it to discover what exists and who is responsible; a catalog record does not mean the underlying data is open or downloadable.
- BFS Registers — BFS overview of enterprise, population, and building and dwelling registers. Documentation and access routes vary by register; inclusion here does not imply access to individual administrative records.
- Swiss official commune register — BFS reference list of commune names, numbers and historical changes. Lookup application.
Administrative data, procurement and official notices
Politics, elections and votes
Legal data
Finance, economy and employment
Health and social insurance
Population, migration and religion
Agriculture and food
- Agrarmarktdaten — Federal Office for Agriculture price and quantity data across agricultural and food markets.
- Agrarbericht — Federal Office for Agriculture reporting on Swiss agriculture.
- Schweizer Nährwertdatenbank — Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office data on the composition of foods available in Switzerland.
- Agristat — Agricultural statistics from the Swiss Farmers’ Union, a non-government publisher. Verify reuse terms for individual products.
- Identitas Tierstatistik — Livestock and companion-animal statistics from Identitas.
- Agroscope research data — Agricultural research datasets and supporting material published by Agroscope on Zenodo, including crop physiology, soil and water experiments. Check each record’s file access and license.
Energy
Buildings, housing and land
Environment, climate and biodiversity
Tourism
- Swiss Tourism Data — Tourism data-source metadata catalog from the National Data Infrastructure for Tourism project. Access and reuse conditions depend on the linked provider.
- Zürich Tourismus — Tourism organization data for Zürich.
- Switzerland Tourism Open Data API — Swiss tourism data from Switzerland Tourism. Requires a free API key; most data is CC BY-SA 4.0, but linked images are excluded from dataset licenses.
Transport
Research repositories
Research data from Swiss institutions and collaborations complements OGD. Licenses and access restrictions vary by record.
- FORS SWISSUbase — Cross-disciplinary repository for Swiss research. Access conditions and licenses vary by record.
- ETH Zürich Research Collection — Institutional repository for research datasets, models, software and publications. Select research-data records and check their file access and licenses; some records are restricted or permit only non-commercial reuse.
- ERIC/open — Eawag aquatic-research repository with downloadable data packages and DOIs, including Swiss water-quality, wastewater and lake studies. Metadata are public domain; file-level reuse terms vary.
- OLOS — Swiss research-data repository with DOI-linked datasets from participating institutions. Includes public, embargoed and restricted archives; check each record’s access level and file license.
- Schweizerischer Nationalfonds SNF — Swiss National Science Foundation research-funding data. Data-story repositories.
- CERN — Particle-physics research data from CERN experiments.
- DaSCH Service Platform — Humanities research-data repository. Linked Data, IIIF and REST services; verify record-level access and reuse conditions.
- Materials Cloud Archive — Computational-materials research repository with versioned dataset downloads.
- BORIS Portal — University of Bern and Inselspital research-data repository with DOI releases. Includes open, embargoed and controlled-access records; select downloadable files with an open license.
Cultural heritage and archives
Discovery resources for cultural and historical material. Open metadata does not establish reuse rights for images, recordings or documents. Collections may include restricted records; check each item’s rights and access information.
- e-rara — Digitized Swiss printed works. Check the rights statement for each digitized work. OAI-PMH, IIIF, full-text and download interfaces.
- e-codices — Virtual manuscript library of Switzerland. Metadata and previews supplied through OAI-PMH are freely reusable; full-resolution images and individual scholarly descriptions can have additional restrictions. Reuse terms and OAI-PMH endpoints.
- Memoriav Memobase — Swiss audiovisual heritage discovery portal. Recording and image rights vary by item.
- DODIS — Swiss diplomatic-history research database. Consult item-level rights before reusing document images.
- Schweizer Landesmuseum — Swiss National Museum collection catalog. Catalog descriptions and object photographs may have different reuse conditions.
- Swiss Federal Archives — Federal archival discovery catalog for Swiss history. Finding aids and available digital documents; some records require an order or access permission.
- Schweizerisches Idiotikon — Research resources documenting Swiss German dialects. Consult the terms of each resource.
- Ortsnamen.ch — Research catalog of Swiss place names. Map search · REST API documentation.
- Swiss National Library open metadata — Bibliographic metadata from Helveticat and the Bibliography of Swiss History, reusable without restrictions. MARC21 via Z39.50 and OAI-PMH on request; rights to the described publications are separate.
- ETH Library Open Data — Bibliographic metadata and digitized collections from ETH Library. Reuse rights vary by collection and item. API platform covers discovery, georeferenced documents and people; requires registration for an API key.
Cantonal portals
Selected cantonal catalogs and statistics portals; coverage varies by portal type. Geodata portals are listed separately below.
Municipal portals
Selected municipal catalogs and statistics portals. Check the linked canton for additional local data.
Geospatial data
Official sources and catalogs
Federal and shared regional discovery services. Metadata and maps can include layers whose download and reuse conditions differ.
Research and environmental geodata
- Datalakes — Eawag lake-measurement data.
- Alplakes — Eawag lake models and remote-sensing products.
- Swiss Data Cube — Earth-observation data infrastructure for Switzerland, operated by Swiss research institutions and UNEP/GRID-Geneva.
- EnviDat — WSL environmental research-data repository. Access conditions and licenses vary by record.
Cantonal and municipal geoportals
Official map and catalog entry points. Consult each layer’s metadata for download services, license and registration requirements.
Community and global geodata
Non-government open geodata with Swiss coverage. OSM-derived and other global products complement official Swiss sources.
- GeoHarvester — Community discovery portal for official Swiss geodata services. Source code.
- geospatial-data-catalogs — Community directory of geospatial datasets across cloud and catalog services. Check each dataset’s license and Swiss coverage.
APIs and linked data
API links appear beside source entries; selected interfaces for common workflows are highlighted here. Catalog APIs return metadata; data APIs return records or observations.
Selected interfaces
- opendata.swiss CKAN API — National OGD metadata catalog interface. Returns metadata; dataset records link onward to the actual data.
- Geo Admin — Federal geodata service documentation.
- Geo Admin STAC — Federal Spatial Temporal Asset Catalog (STAC) interface for discovering and downloading geospatial assets.
- Federal Popular Votes API — Official federal popular-vote results in JSON, with municipal, district, cantonal and national coverage.
- SIMAP API — Swiss public procurement publications in JSON.
- Swiss Energy Dashboard API — Read-only REST API for federal energy time series, statistics and metadata.
- SFOE APIs — Federal Office of Energy interface directory covering energy and mobility services.
- Overpass API (with Overpass QL) — Query OpenStreetMap data using Overpass QL. Swiss restaurant query example.
- Postpass — Query OpenStreetMap data using SQL over PostGIS. Restaurant query example.
- OpenERZ — Community API for municipal waste-collection schedules in Switzerland. Includes Python client source code.
- OpenPLZ API — Community street and postal-code directory for Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria and Germany.
- OpenHolidays API — Community public-holiday and school-holiday data. REST API documentation lists supported countries.
Linked data services
Access structured, linked datasets; see service documentation for query endpoints, supported datasets and examples.
Visualization and data clients
Source-code directories
Software and repository indexes. Check each project’s license; listing does not establish open-source status.
Guides, standards and policy
Community and publications
Organizations and initiatives
Events and meetups
Newsletters
Links lead to subscription pages.
Podcasts
- Statistisch gesehen — RSS feed for the podcast from the Canton of Zürich’s Office for Statistics and Data.
Data journalism
Reusable code and data from Swiss journalism. Linked articles have separate access conditions and rights for text and images.
European comparisons
European catalogs and neighboring countries’ official statistics for cross-border discovery and comparisons. Check definitions, periods, territorial units and Swiss coverage before combining data.
European catalogs and statistics
- European Union — European data catalog for cross-border source discovery. Licenses and access conditions vary by record.
- Eurostat — European statistical data for comparisons involving Switzerland. Check Swiss coverage for each series. Database · GISCO geodata.
- List of European Statistical Offices — Destatis directory of European statistical offices.
- IATE — EU multilingual terminology database for interpreting European administrative concepts.
Neighboring countries
Curation and contributions
Contribute
Found a useful resource, a broken link or something unclear? Issues and pull requests are welcome—a link and a few words are enough. I review every suggestion, and we can work out where it fits together.
When reviewing a resource, I look for:
- Relevance to Swiss open data or the core European comparison sources.
- An identifiable publisher, clear geographic or thematic coverage and a direct link to the resource.
- For data, machine-readable files or an access interface, with documented terms allowing open reuse. For software, source code with an open-source license.
- For guides, communities and other supporting resources, freely accessible material that helps people use or understand open data.
See the curation policy for details. No need to check everything before suggesting a resource—if you’re unsure about fit or reuse terms, we can look together.
To edit directly, use Resource name — contents and coverage. in one or two sentences, with API links beside the source. Prefer one main entry with cross-references; avoid promotional claims and undated counts. I’m happy to help with wording, placement and formatting.
For broken links, please mention what happened: a missing page, an access block or a connection error.
For maintenance scripts, development commands and the agent skill, see the helper documentation.
Curation policy
Data must permit free use, modification and redistribution, including commercial reuse, following the Open Definition. Software must provide source code under an OSI-approved license. Free, non-discriminatory registration is acceptable. Payment, case-by-case permission, non-commercial-only terms and unclear reuse rights do not qualify a dataset or tool for inclusion.
Resources from public authorities, researchers, communities, individuals, non-profits and companies qualify on the same criteria: identifiable provenance, relevance and documented reuse rights. Government publication alone does not establish openness.
Catalogs and repositories may include restricted records if the entry explains this and helps users find reusable material; inclusion does not endorse every record. Guides, standards, communities and journalism must offer freely accessible material that helps people use or understand open data. Linked articles and cultural objects may carry separate rights.
Licence
This list is released under CC0 1.0. Linked resources retain their own licences and terms.
评论