ePSIplatform news

As of 1 January 2012 the Dutch key register for topographic data (called TOP10NL) is available without charge for re-use. Until that moment access to the data cost 50.000 Euro.

In a session yesterday with Danish and Dutch civil servants comparing experiences and actions regarding the availability of basic registries, at the Dutch Ministry for Infrastructure and Environment, some figures were shared concerning the re-use of the TOP10NL data.

Until January 1st, when the TOP10NL data became available for free, the data holder received on average 3 requests for the data per day. The vast majority of these requests came from other public sector bodies. Only 10 external parties were paying for access to the data for re-use, creating a revenue of 500.000 Euro.

Since the data has been made available without charge, the number of data requests has jumped to 35 requests per day, a more than ten-fold increase.

In terms of financing, this meant that the vast majority of costs involved in making the data available was already being financed within the public sector itself, requiring only a change in the way finance streams were allocated. The remaining external revenue of 500.000 Euro was the only amount for which new coverage needed to be found, which was arranged by the Ministry for Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation.

The UK Land Registry as of 30 January is giving access to their monthly transaction data free of charge. This is to be followed by the release of 'Price Paid' data in March 2012.

This is a further step in the UK government's efforts to make key data sets available to the public.

The data is published under the UK's Open Government License.

The transaction data now available is described as:
"The data published on this page gives you information about the number and types of applications that we receive. It is updated monthly and provides the:

• number and types of applications by all account customers
• number and types of transactions for value by all account customers
• number of applications in England and Wales divided by region and local authority district
• number of searches by all account customers."

The 'price paid' data will contain:

"From March 2012 we will release each month the latest monthly residential property price data for all of the residential property sales in England and Wales that are lodged with us for registration. The data will include:

• the full address of the property (Primary addressable object name (PAON), Secondary addressable object name (SAON), street, postcode, locality (if available), town, district, county)
• the price paid for the property
• the date of transfer
• the property type (Detached, Semi, Terraced, Flat/Maisonette)
• whether the property is new build or not
• whether the property is freehold or leasehold."

The deadline for Apps4Italy, the Italian open data competition, has been postponed to 30 April. This at the request of the Italian government, to align the competition with the Digital Agenda and official open data efforts in Italy. At the same time the amount of prize money, and available data has grown.

Apps4Italy is open to anyone in Europe, so this gives you the chance to enter your application into this competition.

A machine translation of the announcement of the changed deadline on the Apps4Italy website:

"To sponsors, developers, local authorities and all those who are following the contest APPS4ITALY

The contest, the first initiative at national level in Italy, has found in recent months, the great interest of all those who care about and believe in the centrality of the theme of Open Data. To date, the prize has grown from 5,000 to reach 45,000 euros. In our small, such as organizers of the initiative, we have tried in recent months, attending conferences, writing posts and promoting the contest to help grow the culture of Italy in the open data. Surely, we can say that something is changing and not a week goes by that there is an announcement of new data sets opened by the Italian government.

As is known the contest comes from below, on the initiative of individuals, associations and companies that have identified in the Open on a theme of common interest. But the initiative has also seen the institutional focus of the previous government that has become the patron. Attention even more vigorously confirmed by the present government considers that the Open Date on which one of the levers to intervene in the coming months.

As a direct result of this institutional handover, we have been requested to postpone the deadline of the contest to April 30 so as to strengthen the initiative and put it in a context designed to promote the Digital Agenda and Open Data in our country.

We believe it is a great opportunity to be seized to make even more effective, the objectives that we set. In thanking all those who are supporting the initiative and, above all those many, and many have already sent proposals, we propose to keep you updated on future developments. Follow developments on the site and for each write request to info@apps4italy.org"

In a document sent to Parliament the Dutch Government responds to the proposals by the European Commission on the PSI Directive and its open government data strategy.

The Dutch government welcomes the proposals, stating that current standard Dutch policy towards PSI re-use actually goes further than the Commission's proposal. Also the EC's steps to lead by example are welcomed.
At the same time the Dutch government announced it is against the extension of the PSI Directive's scope to include cultural heritage data.

While subscribing in general to marginal cost charging for data access, it will also seek to maintain the exemptions regarding charging policies for several government bodies (cadastre, trade register, vehicle register, statistics office, and the Ministry of Defense's hydrographic service). This even though in recent months several steps were taken to alter the pricing models of two of these public bodies (cadastre, trade register). At the same time the Dutch government signals that to in order to create a unified market, it may not be advisable to leave it up to Member States to define their own exemptions.

The Dutch government is against creating an independent body for complaints and redress, saying such independent arbitrars do not exist in the Netherlands governance structures.

The European data portal is welcomed, but the Dutch government says it wants to avoid a centralized pan-European data portal, favoring a federated and distributed solution that re-uses the content of existing national and local data registers, which leaves the data in the hands of the data holders.

The full text (in Dutch) is available in our report section, as well as available from the Dutch government's announcement website.

Following the successful conference in June 2011 in Vienna, organized by the Austrian open government data community, a new edition is planned for June this year. The conference will take place on 19 June in Linz. Linz is one of the Austrian cities that is actively publishing local open government data.

The 2011 conference was focussed on basic knowledge and open data pioneering, whereas this year's edition will aim to discuss new themes. Data portals and regional/local data, data journalism (visualization, storytelling, media) and the open government data lifecycle will be the topics up for discussion.

The ePSIteam intends to participate in this event.

Next Saturday, 3 February, a hack day will take place in Linz. The Open Commons Region Linz is a co-organizer of this event. The Open Commons Region Linz is the program that also drives open government and open data forward, with the aim of strengthening the region. Linz is one of the Austrian cities with an active open government data effort, and a city data portal.

On Saturday 17 March in Linz a BarCamp event will be held on all aspects of openness.
Open government data will be connected to discussions around open access, open innovation, open design etc.

More info on both events:
Hack Day Linz, 3 February
Open Camp Linz, 17 March

The material and presentations of the LAPSI conference that took place last week in Brussels have been published. LAPSI is the European thematic network on legal aspects of PSI re-use.

The material can be found on the LAPSI website, for download.

The LAPSI Team also points to the creation of a LinkedIn group for further discussion:

"Please let me add that we created a LAPSI group on LinkedIn, where we intend to foster the discussion on PSI. Of course we would be very happy if you decided to subscribe and contribute to the discussion!"

Hack Day 30/31 March. 28 June conference.

The newly founded Swiss Open Data Association is planning a hack day and a conference in the spring of 2012.

On March 30 and 31, a hack day will take place simultaneously in the cities Zürich and Geneva. The theme for the coding activities on those two days will be 'mobility'.

A general conference is planned for 28 June 2012, which will take place in Zürich with support of the city administration.

Keep an eye on opendata.ch for updates.

The Dutch national ombudsman Alex Brenninkmeijer has issued criticism on the Dutch government with regard to transparency. Speaking at an event where he presented Dutch investigative ICT journalist Brenno de Winter with the "Journalist of the Year" award, he said that the 'strategic handling of information is against the public interest'. The ombudsman presented a list of 8 principles in dealing with public information requests, which will be part of an advice to the Dutch government. The list also contains a few principles for citizens dealing with government bodies concerning information requests.

The 8 principles start with calling upon government to much more pro-actively publish information, and to try and avoid a legalistic approach to requests, as well as preventing legal battles. Likewise the document calls upon citizens to be reasonable in their information requests and be open to dialogue with a public sector body, when discussing the details of a request.

"Twisting or keeping information back will always come out, and that damages the public's trust in our public institutions" the ombudsman said. Stating that freedom of information law should actually be superfluous, reality is different: "The FOIA law is meant to be able to get at information, but in practice journalists encounter a jungle of procedures that actually make it very difficult."

The UK Cabinet Office has published a summary of the responses received on the Public Consultation "Making Open Data Real".

In their announcement the Cabinet Office states:

"There was a very positive response to the consultation. Launched in August, there were nearly 500 responses submitted before its closure in October.

The consultation set out a series of questions aimed at informing Government’s strategy to embed transparency and open data as core operating principles of the public services. Many of you expressed your support for the principles of open data, your confidence in its ability to bring about a positive change and the benefits it can deliver, including enhancing the performance and delivery of public services and fostering economic growth."

and

"We know how important this agenda is to you and we want to get it right. We will be engaging with our stakeholders over the next couple of months – building on the ideas you shared with us through the consultation and exploring the issues raised. The work does not stop there.

As announced in the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, over 2012 Government will be releasing a range of data in key areas, including: education, welfare, transport, health and life sciences.

This is about giving individuals more control over their interaction with public services and creating an environment for innovation and growth in the UK using public data. For example, Government will soon be releasing highways and traffic data and train and bus real-time timetable data. We know these releases will have real benefits for citizens and business. Taking Transparency and Open Data international, the UK will be assuming the co-Chair of an exciting new partnership, the Open Government Partnership, in March.

If you want to keep updated with the agenda on Twitter you can follow:
@TKelsey1 Tim Kelsey, Director of Transparency and Open Data for UK Government
@UKTransparency UK Government Transparency Team"

All responses, as well as the summary, can be found online for download. We have embedded the summary below as well.

Making Data Real Consultation Summary Responses(function() { var scribd = document.createElement("script"); scribd.type = "text/javascript"; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = "http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js"; var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();

Recently the European Commission awarded the contract for the realization and implementation of the EU Data Portal.

The CKAN project today made public it will be CKAN that will power the data portal, that is planned for release in June 2012.

From the CKAN blog:

"CKAN will form the heart of a new data portal for open data released by the European Commission (EC), the executive body of the EU. The EC portal will go live in June 2012. As well a CKAN-driven catalogue developed by OKF, the site will include data visualisations developed by the Institute for Computer Science (InfAI) at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Project management will be by the Belgian company TenForce."

"Users will be able to search for information in a flexible range of ways, for example by subject area, country, and region (using the recently announced geospatial features of CKAN), and to visualise the data or download it for re-use in research, campaigns or commercial applications. As well as the technical aspects of the project, the EC and the contracted partners will run workshops and other outreach activities, to raise awareness of and interest in the data among companies, researchers, journalists and policy groups."

This is the call for participation for the conference by La Fabrique de la Loi (The Law Factory) on Open Legislative Data. The organizers write:

Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics
Note: The deadline for submission is April 1st 2012!

Call for Participation

When? 6th & 7th July, 2012
Where? Sciences Po in Paris
Who ? The Law Factory (Regards Citoyens + Sciences Po)

How do I get involved?

We welcome different kind of presentations from individual or groups, from academics or hacktivists… or both!

There will be two ways that you can participate:

Lightning presentations (5 minutes)
Talks (10-15 minutes)
You’ll find an on-line application form here: http://www.lafabriquedelaloi.fr/submit-a-proposal/

Application must be sent before April 1st 2012!

We’ve also got a dedicated mailing list for discussions around the conference which you can write to: TheLawFactory [at] ml.regardscitoyens.org. If you’d like to join the discussion, sign up by sending an empty e-mail to TheLawFactory-subscribe [at] ml.regardscitoyens.org.

Can I ask for a grant?

Yes! The Ile-de-France Region is the main sponsor for the conference. We offer limited funding for international participants in order to cover part of their travel and accommodation fees. To ask for a grant, please find more in Grant Call for Applications.

Application must be sent before April 1st 2012. Answers will be provided by April 15th 2012.

Dutch Minister Verhagen for Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation has presented awards to the winners of the Apps for the Netherlands competition during the iBestuur Conference on January 26th.

The winners are:

• Vistory (Gold), which shows historic images and film footage for the geographic location you are in,
• 10.000 Scholen (Silver), which provides detailed information on primary and secondary schools,
• Sola (Bronze), a tool that calculates whether it is feasible to install solar panels on your roof,
• HogeNood (public jury award), a tool pointing you to the nearest public toilet.

Minister Verhagen clearly spoke out in favor of open government data: "Public sector bodies hold a treasure trove full of data for smart and usable apps. We will open up that data, and I hope that provinces as well as municipalities will quickly follow our example."

The competition has also served as a catalyst to get more data available through the national data portal in the Netherlands. In the context of the competition, various public sector bodies have started releasing data, amongst which data on cultural heritage as well as geographic data.

The winners at the Apps voor Nederland award session.

Yearly "National App Award" of 12.500 Euro.

Following up on the Apps for the Netherlands competition, of which the winners were announced last week, the Dutch Ministry for Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation has announced a yearly award. This national Dutch Yearly App Award will go to an application that makes great use of open government data. The prize money is 12.500 Euro, reports Tweakers.net (Dutch press release here).

The award aims to stimulate re-use of public data. The Minister for Economic Affairs gave the starting sign for this award at the iBestuur conference in the Netherlands where he also announced the winners of the Apps for the Netherlands competition that took place in the past few months. "I challenge all developers in the Netherlands to build the best open data app yet."

Balancing Act Africa reports that Ghana is to start the implementation of an open data initiative, following up on the 2010 commitment to the Open Government partnership.

Balancing Act Africa writes: "The Ghana government in collaboration with World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF), an NGO, is to commence the implementation of the Ghana Open Data Initiative to make government data available to citizens for re-use.

The initiative if implemented will make government more transparent, improve efficiency and spark off innovation from the demand side for applications to be developed to better serve the citizenry.

William Tevie, Director General of the National Information Technology Agency (NITA), announced this at a stakeholders meeting to sign a memorandum of Understanding between Government of Ghana and WWWF in Accra on Thursday.

He said in September 2010, Ghana made a commitment to join the open Government partnership, an initiative of the United State Government.
“This was a commitment by the Government of Ghana to work towards an open Government data initiative, which will make Government data available to the citizens for re-use,” he added.

Tevie explained that providing Government data without developing an open data community that works towards making it meaningful and re-usable by the citizenry would not serve the interest of the state. He noted that over the years the agency has been rolling out the e-government infrastructure and facilitating the roll-out of e-government application.

The aim of the project in rolling out the network is to ensure efficiency within government and improved services for citizens and business. Jose Alonso, Data Programme Manager, WWWF, said they were in the country to share their experience and expertise and to support government in the implementation process.

He noted that the initiative would increase transparency of governments; boost number of services to people, new business opportunities and jobs for application and service developers, new synergies between government, public administration, and civil society organizations.

“It will also increase citizen participation and inclusion through extended offers of services closer to them and new, innovative uses of data in a ways that owners of data would never have thought of,” he added. He observed that for data to be useful, it should be complete, primary, timeliness, ease of physical and electronic access and machine readability.

Source: Ghana Business News"

UPDATE:
The WWF blog posting announcing the project
The WWF project page

The Law Factory (Regards Citoyens and Sciences Po) are organizing "Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics"

The Law Factory is a French group made of hacktivists (Regards Citoyens) and academics (Centre d’études européennes & médialab Sciences Po). They are organizing a conference in Paris about Parliamentary informatics.

The conference has two aims:

• discussing the latest developments regarding parliamentary informatics, eg. parliamentary open data, computer analysis of parliamentary activities, e-parliament…
• assemble two groups that usually do not communicate: the academic world of legislative studies and individuals and organizations from across the open data and parliamentary informatics spectrum.

On the program will be aspects of parliamentary studies linked to the use of computer science, be it in order to present existing projects, to explore new informatics tool, to discuss their effects, to analyze legislatures through open parliamentary data.

Special attention will be given to the five following areas:

• Law tracking. How MPs change draft bill in assemblies? Is there a way of collecting and presenting systematic data about the amendments?
• Roll call analysis. How MPs vote in assemblies? How can their votes be presented through dynamic informatics visualization? Public access to their votes being almost always partial, what is the value of focusing only on on-line accessible votes? Also, what is the added-value of software developments for the spatial theory of voting in assemblies?
• Discourse analysis. How MPs talk in assemblies? Studies of political discourse through lexicometry computer programs have developed strong results to that question. What is therefore the impact of a greater online access to parliamentary public debate?
• Parliamentary informatics in developing countries. What is the state of open data related to legislatures in developing countries? What is or can be the role of the on-line access to those data for improving democracy? For fighting against corruption?
• The pros and the cons of opening data for parliaments. Can we assess concrete improvements of parliamentary democracy through the development of on-line access to their activity? On which aspect (corruption, attendance, law quality, parliamentary turnover, electoral participation…)? Conversely, what are the threats associated with increasing transparency in legislatures?

All the presentations will be held in English.

The Spanish national data portal datos.gob.es was awarded the LAPSI Award for most user friendly PSI portal today in Brussels, during the LAPSI conference. LAPSI is the EU funded thematic network for legal aspects of PSI re-use.

Of all entries submitted, the jury selected datos.gob.es as the winner. The data.gob.es team posted a blog posting in response to receiving the award.

(Disclosure: the ePSIplatform team provided a jury member for this award.)

The local open data community in the Dutch city of Enschede is organizing a open data hack day on February 11th. The day is taking place in close cooperation with civil servants of the Enschede city government.

The hack day will see the official launch of the city's open data portal, by one of the aldermen. The platform automatically publishes data from back office applications to the web, in various formats. With this launch Enschede will be the first city in the Netherlands with a data publishing platform. The platform's launch comes about a year after the city adopted an Open Data Motion.

About a dozen Dutch cities are currently implementing open data projects (e.g. Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Nijmegen, Eindhoven, Utrecht and Tilburg). These cities are collaborating on their open data efforts as part of the 'digital cities agenda', a translation of the EU Digital Agenda to local contexts.

The hack day in Enschede is free, but participants are requested to register. Ton Zijlstra of our team is part of the local community in Enschede, and will attend the event.

Last week Figshare was relaunched. Originally launched in January 2011 as a proof of concept, it is now being relaunched as a fully functional platform, with the support of Digital Science, a division of MacMillan Publishers Ltd. See the press release.

This community based data platform, now offers new functionality, such as unlimited public storage space. It hopes to encourage academics to publish more of their data, including negative results, or material that did not end up in published research.

“We are a data sharing platform where you can add figures that might otherwise go unpublished – complete with the raw data tables.”, it says in the FAQ.

This way scientists should be able to both get more credit for all of their work, as well as enable more re-use of material and avoid needless repetition of work.

Figshare can also be followed on Twitter.

The French region (Departement) Loire-Atlantique is gearing up to the launch of its regional data portal in March of this year.

In a recent posting on the regional government's data blog, a list of data sets that are under consideration for release at the launch of the portal is described.

The list can be downloaded as PDF, and provides the names, file formats and the themes the data is relevant to.

Loire-Atlantique is one of several regions working on open data projects.