Looking back at EU Open Data Days 2021: ‘Creating open data ecosystems’
Discover five projects that contribute to the open data policy
Last November, the Publications Office of the European Union organised the first ever EU Open Data Days . Over three days (23-25 November 2021), the event showed the benefits of open data to more than 2300 registered EU public sector representatives, citizens and businesses, under the main motto: ‘shape our future with open data’.
Over 70 speakers from all over the world took the floor in six thematic sessions. Each of these sessions provided an overview of innovative techniques and best practices used in both the private and the public sectors, offering the participants valuable insights into open data and data visualisation techniques and practices.
In a series of news pieces, we will recap each of these thematic sessions of the EU Open Data Days. The first thematic session addressed the topic of ‘Creating open data ecosystems’ to ensure a trustworthy data-sharing and unlock the socioeconomic potential of open data for better evidence-based policies.
Throughout this session, five presentations gave insights into different EU-funded and Member States´ initiatives contributing to (EU) open-data policies and strategies:
- ´Towards sustainable open-data ecosystems` , held by Bastian Van Loenen (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands), introduced a new educational programme called ODECO on sustainable open-data ecosystems. The aim of the 4-year Horizon 2020 initiative is to train young open data researchers to advance current open-data systems towards being user-driven, circular, inclusive and skill-based – in line with the European Commission’s 2019–2024 and the Berlin Declaration goals.
- Giorgia Lodi (Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies of the National Research Council, Italy) presented the European ‘Water health open knowledge’ (WHOW)`. The project aims at creating an open knowledge graph that links together data on water consumptions and pollution with health parameters and disease diffusion, to be further reused for development of innovative services.
- In the third presentation, different perspectives on ´going towards a public procurement data space` were provided. Isabel da Rosa (DG GROW, European Commission) described the European Commission´s work on a public procurement data strategy proposing the creation of a public procurement data space based on a federated model, where TED data and data from national databases in the EU can be integrated. Timo Rantanen (Finnish State Treasury, Finland) talked about the experience of the Finnish State Treasury in gathering and making public procurement data and other governmental data open, to improve data quality, better understand the market and foster business creation. Giovanni Paolo Sellitto (National Anticorruption Authority, Italy) gave an overview of the Italian Open Data Portal on Procurement and described how standardisation and domain knowledge sharing are key aspects when moving towards an e-procurement data space.
- Angela Baker (EuroGeographics AISBL, Belgium) presented ´Open maps for Europe: accessing official, online, public-sector geospatial open data`. Her intervention focused on the Connecting Europe Facility project ´open maps for Europe`, which provides free to use maps from more than 40 European countries. This is thanks to datasets based on official maps, as well as geospatial and land information from official national sources. The project not only makes more data available through harmonised open data licenses and produces open Pan-European harmonised datasets, but also improves re-useability and sustainability of geo-spatial public sector information.
- The topic of the last presentation was ´Data for R&I policy– better transparency, coordination and benchmarking of policies and results?`. Here, Pavel Zbornik (DG RTD, European Commission) showed how such policy questions can be addressed by polling research & innovation-related open data from sources such as data.europa.eu, EU funding systems or national CRIS systems. At the same time, he highlighted the challenges of gathering data from various sets, while ensuring a common understanding of terms and allowing interoperability.
To learn more about these and other presentations, visit the EU Open Data Days site, where you can find official press releases, promotional materials, as well as the recordings of all contributions!
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