About us
The OpenHelvetia association
OpenHelvetia is an association. It builds the interface that makes Switzerland's machine-readable data holdings efficiently usable for AI systems, and keeps the directory for it.
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Why we exist
Switzerland publishes its public data machine-readable and well kept: federal law in Fedlex with a SPARQL endpoint, the federal administration's data in the Linked Data Service LINDAS, datasets on opendata.swiss, statistics at the Federal Statistical Office. This infrastructure exists. It stays with the organisations that run it.
For an AI system it is reachable, but expensive to use: it has to know the right source, master its query language and data model, and back the answer itself. Where that fails, the system guesses. It invents articles, quotes repealed versions and computes figures nobody published.
OpenHelvetia builds the interface in between: an open standard that describes which interface a source has and how to address it, a directory of those descriptions, and tools with which an AI system uses the holdings directly and with evidence. That is how the information reaches the people who need it. And we hold ourselves to the same standard we ask of everyone else.