GINIS

GINIS

If you're looking for quick examples of how to interact with the GINIS system, jump ahead to Interacting with the API

GINIS (opens in a new tab) is the system which tracks all the official documents which the city hall processes, their assignment and resolution, as well as all the official communication of the city, whether it's between the government and the citizen, or government-to-government. It's provided by czech company GORDIC.

A somehow-inaccurate-but-straightforward explanation for someone coming from a private sector is that it serves a similar role as a CRM (opens in a new tab) system might serve in a sales driven company.

The slovak name for all of this is "registratúra".

GINIS is not to be confused with NORIS, which is the city hall's financial system. Often the two systems need to integrate and interact.

Access

You can access this system either by web interface (as the clerks handling the documents do) or through API. To do so you'll need credentials, permissions to view the appropriate environment/section, and you can only do this from the internal network or through VPN.

Documentation and system hierarchy

The definite source of docs for the API is the official GINIS documentation (opens in a new tab). You need to register on the site before you can access them. Note that not all of the interfaces listed are available to us (we should be able to request them if needed though).

Modules / Interfaces / services

GINIS consists of multiple "modules" or "interfaces" or "services" - as far as we know these terms are interchangeble within the GINIS system. These are the 3 letter abbreviations like SSL ("spisová služba"), UDE ("uradni deska"), POD (" podatelna"), which group together similar functionalities. Each service runs on a separate url and can be configured by GORDIC.

Actions

Each interface groups together a related list of actions you can do against the GINIS system (again, the official docs are your best reference). These allow you to request and interact with the entities stored in the GINIS system.

The modules seem to overlap in the entities that they deal with (for example, you can manipulate the documents submitted through e-forms through both SSL and POD), but different interfaces may provide different actions, and those in turn may provide different data about those entities.

Interacting with the API

If you are at home in the js/ts/node environment, you can start by looking at @bratislava/ginis-sdk (opens in a new tab) and it's docs - either using it's methods directly or browsing the code to get an idea how the requests towards GINIS look like.

Within the official GINIS documentation (opens in a new tab), you can browse through valid request/response formats of all the interfaces and available actions - this should get you started when you need to expand the ginis-sdk capabilities.

If expanding in this way, it's preferred to add this functionality into the ginis-sdk to keep it as our single source of GINIS integration.