Technical instructions

Open source project on GitHub

The SDG online platform is a publicly accessible tool for the dissemination and presentation of German data for the indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations 2030 Agenda.

To comply with the United Nations‘ basic principles for official statistics, the minimum characteristics of an SDG online platform should be the following:
The SDG online platform

• is managed by the national statistical offices;
• contains official statistics and metadata according to a standard methodology that has proved its worth;
• is publicly available;
• allows feedback from data users;
• is operated using open source (free) technologies.

In addition, the SDG online platform has been developed according to recognised international guidelines, in particular regarding freely accessible data and software.

Sources

The Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) actively supports the development of national online platforms, in particular as open source solutions for the presentation of SDG indicators. Pioneers in this area are the USA and Great Britain. The current version of the German online platform was developed on the basis of an earlier version of the British online platform and adapted to the needs of German statistics. The project code for the SDG online platform is publicly available in the Github repository.

A universal version of the codes for an online platform developed by the United States, Great Britain and the Center for Open Data Enterprise is available. The SDG online platform is based on this. If you are interested, we recommend that you familiarise yourself with the SDG online platforms of the United States and Great Britain and the relevant Open SDG project documentation. This contains technical instructions on how to make a copy of the Open SDG online platform.

• SDG online platform of the United States

• SDG online platform of Great Britain

If you have comments or feedback on the Open SDG project or would like to participate in the Open SDG community, please contact Open SDG GitHub.

Applied technology

Back-end IT requirements:

• GitHub: hosting website designed for programming projects using the Git version control system
• Jekyll: generator of static pages written in Ruby

Front-end IT requirements:

• XHTML, CSS, JavaScript
• Chartist: JavaScript library that offers customizable and responsive charts
• Bootstrap: framework CSS