The educational system in the Netherlands is complex, and many public bodies are tasked with keeping schools and students on the right track. However, data regarding this task is made available to the general public in a way it is not easily processable, which makes checks by the public (and press) more difficult.

The Open Onderwijs API alleviates this problem by providing a unified interface to data on education collected from several institutions with different responsibilities with regard to the Dutch educational system.

The Open Onderwijs API is built on open source technology, Scrapy, Sphinx for the documentation, and ElasticSearch for efficient data storage and retrieval. Also, all school addresses are geocoded using the BAG42 service, an Dutch initiative aiming to integrate high quality, official data sources with “regular” geocoding. Data is available through a simple REST API and as downloadable tarrballs and exposes powerful search capabilities.