Share-PSI 2.0 - Nexa Center for Internet & Society

Status: concluded
Period: February 2013 – July 2016
Funding: € 937,500 for the entire project (Nexa Center funding: € 20,000)
Funding organization: European Commission (CIP-ICT-PSP.2013.2.2b )
Person(s) in charge: Lorenzo Canova (Nexa Project Manager)

Executive summary

Coordinated by the W3C (with 42 partners) and submitted under the EU ICT-PSP Call 2013, Share PSI 2.0 aims at bringing together stakeholders to continue in the definition of technical standards for PSI.

Background

In the open government data arena, some technical standards are well established. It would be of great benefit expand the breadth of coverage to include the majority of EU member states and beyond; and, also, expand the depth of coverage as subjects are explored among a wide range of stakeholders inside and outside government. In fact, agreement on standards to enable interoperability and integration of public sector information across Europe and beyond are increasingly needed. Share-PSI 2.0 is the European network for the exchange of experience and ideas around implementing open data policies in the public sector. It brings together government departments, standards bodies, academic institutions, commercial organizations, trade associations and interest groups to identify what does and doesn’t work, what is and isn’t practical, what can and can’t be expected of different stakeholders, taking as an input the revised European Directive on Public Sector Information.

Objectives

The main practical objective of the Share-PSI2.0 network is to organize a series of workshops examining different aspects of PSI. In each workshop, the network partners with direct experience will present their case studies. These will be complemented by external speakers who will be invited via the typical route of a call for participation, peer review of submitted papers and selection by a programme committee.
As a specific objective in the reporting period, the network intended to define the agenda and topics for its workshops, as well as internal procedures and organizing committees, to which all partners are asked to contribute.
The final tangible outcome of Share PSI 2.0 workshops and project will be a “best practices document” about the most appropriate standards to be used in the publication of open data, the contingent need for further standards work, and experiences of using those standards. These best practices will then be adviced in “Localised Guides” to be drafted for each participating country in its own language.

As far as the objectives of the Nexa Center are concerned, we aim at continue discussing with key institutions about cutting edge topics in technical research and policy support in the PSI domain.

Results

The network identified the following topics as focuses for its periodical workshops: Uses of open data within government for innovation and efficiency (Samos, July 2014); Encouraging data usage by commercial developers (Lisbon, December 2014); Open Data Priorities and Engagement (Timisoara, March 2015); A self sustaining business model for open data (Krems, May 2015); Using and extending core vocabularies for greater interoperability (Berlin, November 2015).
The Nexa Center will be involved in all workshops (within the organizing committee, or presenting research).

The Nexa intern Lorenzo Canova (now research fellow) -with Antonio Vetrò, Marco Torchiano, Federico Morando, and Raimondo Iemma- presented his paper “OpenCoesione and Monithon – a transparency effort” in the first Share-PSI2.0 workshop in Samos. OpenCoesione is the Italian portal reporting spending data of the 2007-2013 European Cohesion funds. The paper analyzes the way information is structured and exposed in the portal, and presents evidence on how open data can positively affect transparency and efficiency of public sector bodies.
Conclusion and results of the workshop can be found here.

On the 3rd and 4th of December 2014, the Nexa Research Fellow Lorenzo Canova attended the workshop in Lisbon on “Encouraging open data usage by commercial developers” (see here for the workshop description). The workshop takeaways are described in this report .
The 5th of december 2014, the first project review took place in Lisbon, with positive outcome. In this occasion, it was agreed with the rewievers to concentrate, as regards the best practices document, more on policy oriented best practices than on technical ones.

On the 16th and 17th of March 2015, the Nexa Research Fellow Lorenzo Canova attended the workshop in Timisoara on “Open Data Priorities and Engagement” (see here for the workshop description). The workshop presentations and notes are available here, the final report is available here.

On the 20-21st of May 2015 the workshop “A self sustaining business model for open data” took place in Krems together with the CeDEM15 conference. Lorenzo and Raimondo attended the events. The workshop takeaways are available here.

In the context of this project, in July 2015, Lorenzo has presented the new results obtained by the analysis on the Italian public procurement data at the Samos Summit 2015 on ICT-enabled Governance.

Several best practices (BPs) have been defined and can be found on this page. Lorenzo and the Nexa Center have especially contributed to the BPs regarding data quality assestment and feedback procedures to improve data quality.

The final Share PSI workshop “Maximising interoperability — core vocabularies, location-aware data and more” took place in Berlin on the 25-26th of November 2015. The description of the workshop and the call for participation is available on the this page.

On September 14th 2016 the final project review took place in Brussels. The outcomes were positive and it seems likely that there will be be a recommendation from the reviewers that the Commission task the European Data Portal with maintaining the Share PSI Community.

In January 2017, the EU Data Portal has published a copy of the all-encompassing Share-PSI best practices document (of which Lorenzo Canova and the Nexa Center staff are editors), See here