Open-DAI - Nexa Center for Internet & Society

Status: concluded
Period: February 2012 – September 2014
Funding: 1,645,984 € for the entire project (Nexa Center funding: 88,400 €)
Funding organization: European Commission (CIP-ICT-PSP-2011-5)
Person(s) in charge: Federico Morando (Nexa project manager)

Executive summary

Open-DAI is a platform that directly extracts data from legacy databases that sit behind existing public sector applications. Under the rules defined by the data holder, it generates a virtualised version of the database in the cloud, and exposes the transformed data as services (RESTful APIs), therefore providing data reusers with a ‘real time’ connection with the legacy data. In the last year of the project, partners -and the Nexa Center in particular- worked on sustainability scenarios beyond the project life as a funded initiative. In November 2014, Open-DAI has successfully gone through the final review before the European Commission.

Background

Funded under the objective “Towards a cloud of Public Services” of the European ICT-PSP 2007 – 2013, Open-DAI is coordinated by the Consortium for Information Services of Regione Piemonte and gathers 11 partners (across 4 countries), mostly public data holders and ICT in-house providers. The Nexa Center contributed to all aspects of the project, and had a leading role in the “Exploitation and Impact” work package. Beyond a market-oriented one, making available Open-DAI available as an open source platform maintained by one of the partners was furthermore identified as the more likely option fo the exploitation of Open-DAI. All documentation is available at http://open-dai.eu/platform/docs, while the platform is available at http://open-dai.eu/platform/download.

Objectives

The Nexa Center was committed to defining exploitation scenarios for Open-DAI, including a business-oriented one, as well as supporting the adoption of the Open-DAI platform by the partners, and by third parties, such as public administrations and other types of organisations. Besides, the Nexa Center took in charge the task to define an exploitation plan for the last year of the project, with the aim to maximise its impact in terms of adoption by public administrations, and reuse of datasets released via Open-DAI by developers.

Results

During the final year of the project, the Nexa Center supported the publication of user-friendly documentation, and the public release of Open-DAI, also contributing in involving interested third parties. Besides, the Nexa Center achieved an increased awareness of the Open-DAI positioning with respect to similar solutions (see Breaking public administrations’ data silos to enable open data services: the case of Open-DAI (“Best paper award” at the Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government, CeDEM 2014, and published in the
eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government (JeDEM), Vol 6, No 2 (2014). Moreover, by supporting the development of Open-DAI from the early stage, and performing usability tests, the Nexa Center increased its knowledge and expertise on the technological components used/developed in the project.
In July 2013, the Nexa Center organised a hackathon focused on the reuse of the datasets made available through Open-DAI.
Finally, the paper by Luca Leschiutta and Giuseppe Futia, Open Access and Database Anonymization an Open Source Procedure Based on an Italian Case Study (presented at the Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government, CeDEM 2014, and published in its proceedings) is focused on a (road accident) dataset used in one of the pilot apps developed by the project.

As far as future evolutions are concerned, the Nexa Center intends to build on the Open-DAI technology -and/or some of its components, such as Teiid- for future pilot/research projects and/or consultancy activities aimed at exposing third parties data as services. The Nexa Center also plans to experiment the use Open-DAI internally (to expose the open data of the Politecnico as services). This happened also as a by-product of the testing activity performed within the project itself (because such activity allowed the Nexa Center to gain additional technical expertise on using Open-DAI, which could be leveraged within such pilot projects).