Open Data Portal

Finite Software Systems built the Open Data Portal of the Republic of Bulgaria (data.egov.bg) — the national infrastructure through which the Bulgarian state publishes public-sector information in machine-readable open formats to citizens, business, researchers and the media. Commissioned by the Administration of the Council of Ministers under the EU-funded “Good Governance” programme, it was a full-lifecycle delivery against a tight public-procurement schedule: FSS coordinated the project, built and tested the system, deployed and rolled it out, and trained the civil servants who operate it — handed over on time and in full scope, with no penalties.

The architecture was 100% FSS's own design — and it proved to be the right one. The very same architecture has served the entire state administration for years: delivered in 2018, it still runs data.egov.bg in production today. We have maintained and evolved it continuously across successive state contracts — the Administration of the Council of Ministers, then the State e-Government Agency, then the Executive Agency for e-Government Infrastructure — more than eight years of unbroken operation.

Technically it is a Laravel/PHP web application on MySQL, with Elasticsearch for search and indexing, handling a wide range of open-data formats — spreadsheets, Word, PDF, RDF and Markdown. Alongside the portal, FSS delivered a tool for automated data ingestion by administrations and other public-sector bodies. The code is open-source under the EUPL-1.2 licence in the Bulgarian government's public GitHub repository, so the work is publicly auditable.