[open-government] OGD in the IT system procurement cycle

Mon Oct 31 15:10:57 UTC 2011

Hi Antii, hi all,

thank you for starting this very interesting discussion here - that is an issue
that we at SWC (http://www.semantic-web.at) & the Austrian chapter of the OKFN are thinking 
about very intense at the moment!

Also in the course of the LOD2 FP7 project (http://lod2.eu - where we have the use case: 
publicdata.eu - where harmonised data & meta data mechanisms and interop. in the course 
of open data plays a crucial role as well as there is a 2nd use case of public procurement 
using linked data principles, lead by the Economic University of Prague, Czech Republic - 
see: http://www.slideshare.net/lod2project/lod2-wp9a-overview-presentation).

I personally do think that there are several important aspects of this issue 
(try a top down approach from EU to local level) - we should take into account 
when we do think about (open) data & information management for the public sector:

(1) EU level: Neelie Kroes points out a strong need of A) open data and B) interop in e-gov
in the course of her digital agenda - one part of this is the announcement of the pan-eu data portal
for 2013 - a single point of access to (all?) EU27 national open data portals - as we do have federated 
open data structures in Europe this cannot be managed without (harmonised) strategies in interop & data, 
information & metadata management in the Member States (MSs) ... maybe in the course of the reworked 
PSI directive in early / mid 2012 as well as for the mentioned pan eu data portal there will be some guidelines
by the EC similar to INSPIRE (http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/) for geo data? But as we do know that 
these activities of the EC always takes a long time to be implemented by the MSs I think we cannot wait until this!

(2) Worldwide aspect: furthermore this above mentioned interop and data mgnt aspects need to be
seen on a global level too - how to mash EU data with some data from e.g. thw World Bank or
Australien / Canadien data?! Guidelines / recommendations for interoperability, standards in data 
and metadata publishhing & management could help a lot here...

(3) National level: there are lots of single open data systems in many countries today - e.g. communities, 
cities, single departments (ministries), NGO/NPO and national open data activities - bringing these activities 
together for a national single point of access to all data of a single country means to set upa national 
open data strategy - I do like the idea of a 'national digital infrastructure' that also contains all important
issues of open data (from publishing over licensing to media literacy aspects etc).

(4) Regional and local level: most of the time the raw data is collected / created on this level - and 
to service the above mentioned levels the publishing process should follow some national open data guidelines 
(national guidelines should follow the EU wide etc)... but to develop this guidelines a bottom up approach seems to
be interesting starting to evaluate existing local / regional data management & - publishing routines - to rework this 
and implement new ways of data publishing on the basis of open data principles...

As I know there are several activities already going on in this direction - but these activities
are little co-ordinated and/or do not know from each other:

Global / EU level:

W3C
This issue is discussed in the W3C GLD (Gov Linked Data) working group, see: 
http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/wiki/Main_Page
e.g. public procurement on linked open data contracts is one of the main topics
as well as interoperability and recommendations for data management.
See also W3C eGov interest group: http://www.w3.org/egov/wiki/Main_Page

EC / ISA - semic.eu
There is a very interesting paper by the ISA Framework (EC, ISA – the Interoperability Solutions for 
European Public Administrations programme) about: Open Gov Metadata, see:
http://www.semic.eu/semic/view/documents/towards_open_government_metadata.pdf

Furthermore semic.eu and the European Interoperability Framework (http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/3473/5585.html)
are doing work in this direction too

National level:

data.gov.uk
The UK government is working to harmonise their data management on a national level - as I know (but I am not involved)
the National Archives UK are leading this - Matthew Pearce of National Archives was in Warsaw at the OGD camp and gave 
a short overview of existing initiatives - e.g. legisaltion.gov.uk wher are legal information of UK is published via
a Gov Linked Data system in human and machine readable formtas - beside other systems that already go in this direction.
I think the slides of John Sheridan of his talk at the OGD2011 conference in Vienna is a good starting point:
http://www.slideshare.net/semwebcompany/linking-uk-government-data-john-sheridan

Austrian Government
In July 2011 there was the foundation of the 'Cooperation OGD Austria' - that is driven by 4 Austrian cities
and the national government (we are invited experts there) - the first guidelines for open data in Austria 
contains recommendations for:  A) the used license (CC-BY has won here - what is a great approach oiut of my opinion),
B) the use of open source software (CKAN as recommended data catalogue software!!), recommendation for the URL schema
for open data systems in Austria, etc... 
See details here: http://www.open3.at/2011/07/cooperation-open-government-data-osterreich-gegrundet
(Sorry only available in German language - but I do think using Google translate should be sufficient to 
get the most important points)

Furthermore we have created a recommendation for a metadata structure to use when publishing open data 
in Austria - this document is in review process at the moment - will be translated to English and published
before the end of the year...

This Austrian OGD recommendations should be taken into account by ALL public bodies in Austria that will
publish open data in the future...ministries, cities, the national gov, regional governments et at!

I am sure there are many others - a public 'best practise collection' would be helpful - e.g. I do know that
there is a metadata portal for eGovernment in Finland - mentioned in the ISA report given above!

Summary

There is a strong need for open data management (incl. OGD publishing) guidelines / recommendations on the side 
of data holders / publishers on local - regional - national - EU-wide - maybe worldwide level - to ensure 
interoperability to enable the real potential of open data: the easy & powerful use & re-use of data, information
& metadata - for several stakeholders as public administration itself (internal use, eGov services), politicians (e.g. decision making),
citizen analysts, data journalists and also (hopefully more & more) the economy (open data and business)!

Important issues are:

 - evaluate the existing data management and publishing processes on the side of the respective data holders

 - specify a data management and -publishing strategy including open data requirements 
(e.g. the UK government is working with linked data principles and technologies as an underlying technologies 
for data publishing - for the users they provide APIs on top of this - see also: 
http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2010/papers/ldow2010_paper14.pdf)

 - Provide (web) APIs on top of this data management approach to be used for: A) eGov services as e.g. an information portal
as well as B) for open data services (access to the raw data) - as also pointed out by David Eaves in Warsaw!

 - Take the metadata management into account from the beginning (metadata management becomes very cost intense the later you start it) 
- specify meta data schemas (-structure) as well as metadata properties (e.g. thesauri or taxonomies for categorisation and / or tagging etc)
Remark: do not forget to integrate existing national (and international) data and metadata structures 

 - As an output you can furthermore specify (national) open data guidelines and recommendations for data holders & publishers

 - Integrate this new mechanisms and guidelines into the existing data management and publishing processes

 - Get the key stakeholders on board to support this and to convince other departments etc to follow this recommendations
(Key stakeholders include also the respective eGov vendors who have to integrate this guidelines into their systemsmore & more)

Finally I think that linked (open) data will be an important part of this whole game - see also short blog post
and all slides of the Gov Linked Data workshop by LOD2, W3C and EC in the course of the Warsaw Camp:
http://lod2.eu/BlogPost/739-lod2-organised-government-linked-data-workshop-in-warsaw-was-big-success.html
where I tried to show the way & the benfits from open data to linked open data: http://slidesha.re/pU1q2B

Thats it with some first ideas from my side  (sorry if this email escalated a little bit) - I am very interested in your thoughts 
about this topic....many thanks for feedback in advance!

All the best from Vienna, Austria - martin

--
Martin Kaltenböck, CMC
Managing Partner, CFO
Semantic Web Company (SWC)
Mariahilferstrasse 70 / Neubaugasse 1, Top 8
A - 1070 Vienna, Austria
Tel +43.1.402 12 35 - 25, Fax +43.1.402 12 35 - 22

COMPANY INFORMATION
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http://blog.semantic-web.at
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LOD2 - Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data - http://lod2.eu/

PERSONAL INFORMATION
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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: OGD in the IT system procurement cycle (Antti Poikola)
   2. Re: OGD in the IT system procurement cycle (M. Fioretti)
   3. Re: OGD in the IT system procurement cycle (David Eaves)
   4. Re: OGD in the IT system procurement cycle (Antti Poikola)
   5. Re: OGD in the IT system procurement cycle (JOSEFSSON Erik)
   6. Re: OGD in the IT system procurement cycle (Antti Jogi Poikola)
   7. NACE rev2 / ISIC4 mappings (P?ll Hilmarsson)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2011 15:31:46 +0200
From: Antti Poikola <antti.poikola at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [open-government] OGD in the IT system procurement cycle
To: innovation institute <innovation-navigator at chello.at>
Cc: open-government at lists.okfn.org
Message-ID: <4EAD51C2.40301 at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Hi Gerhard,

I would no be so pessimistic..

On 30.10.2011 12:28, innovation institute wrote:
> 1. never heard on any similar initiatives across Europe.
Someone has to be first ;)

> 2. 90 percent of OGD are historical government sources...

Sure, old legacy systems are technically challenged, but new systems are 
under development all the time.

> 3. 99 percent of all obstacles relate to legal and organistional barriers ...

Sure, legal-, organizational- and attitude problems are real obstacles 
(I would count maybe 70% for those), but still the underlying technical 
platforms may add additional barriers or on the positive side make the 
opening decision easier.

-Antti Poikola

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:40:01 +0100
From: "M. Fioretti" <mfioretti at nexaima.net>
Subject: Re: [open-government] OGD in the IT system procurement cycle
To: open-government at lists.okfn.org
Message-ID: <20111031064001.GC5861 at nexaima.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 15:31:46 PM +0200, Antti Poikola wrote:

> >2. 90 percent of OGD are historical government sources...
> 
> Sure, old legacy systems are technically challenged, but new systems
> are under development all the time.

Right. the fact that most of what already exist is not Open Data and
not technically convertible to it without a certain effort is no
reason to not say from now that everything _new_ must be (at least
technically) OD. See point 4.3 of

http://www.lem.sssup.it/WPLem/odos/odos_2.html

Marco

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2011 23:58:10 -0700
From: David Eaves <david at eaves.ca>
Subject: Re: [open-government] OGD in the IT system procurement cycle
To: Antti Poikola <antti.poikola at gmail.com>
Cc: open-government at lists.okfn.org
Message-ID: <4EAE4702.905 at eaves.ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

On the legal front, I'd disagree. 99% of barriers have been legal and 
organizational to date... but as we enjoy greater success the technical 
barriers will become more significant. This is certainly true in 
Vancouver where there is a team that is quite dedicated to getting data 
open, the problem is all the legacy systems which makes it very 
difficult (or expensive) to do so.

As we go deeper into the stack on this issue, the barriers will shift, 
so getting open data written into procurement policy is critical.

On 11-10-30 6:31 AM, Antti Poikola wrote:
> Hi Gerhard,
>
> I would no be so pessimistic..
>
> On 30.10.2011 12:28, innovation institute wrote:
>> 1. never heard on any similar initiatives across Europe.
> Someone has to be first ;)
>
>> 2. 90 percent of OGD are historical government sources...
>
> Sure, old legacy systems are technically challenged, but new systems 
> are under development all the time.
>
>> 3. 99 percent of all obstacles relate to legal and organistional 
>> barriers ...
>
> Sure, legal-, organizational- and attitude problems are real obstacles 
> (I would count maybe 70% for those), but still the underlying 
> technical platforms may add additional barriers or on the positive 
> side make the opening decision easier.
>
> -Antti Poikola

------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:54:06 +0200
From: Antti Poikola <antti.poikola at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [open-government] OGD in the IT system procurement cycle
To: David Eaves <david at eaves.ca>, open-government at lists.okfn.org
Message-ID: <4EAE703E.6000909 at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Hi all,

So, are there any examples of what should be written in the general 
procurement policy or in the individual procument documents? I am really 
not an procurement expert, but this question is often asked from me, 
propably because the procurement experts are far from being open data 
experts.

-Jogi

On 31.10.2011 8:58, David Eaves wrote:
> As we go deeper into the stack on this issue, the barriers will shift, 
> so getting open data written into procurement policy is critical. 

------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:10:45 +0100
From: "JOSEFSSON Erik" <erik.josefsson at europarl.europa.eu>
Subject: Re: [open-government] OGD in the IT system procurement cycle
To: <open-government at lists.okfn.org>
Message-ID:
	<BFB8C54A55E15345AD245DB3CCC0353804E5B729 at EMAILBRUSV21.ep.parl.union.eu>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

There is a guideline for how to procure Free Software here:

	Guideline on public procurement of Open Source Software (revised June 2010)
	http://www.ychi.leeds.ac.uk/eHealthOS/storage/resources/OSS-procurement-guideline-public-final-June2010-EUPL-FINAL.pdf

I guess it could be forked.

//Erik

On 10/31/2011 10:54 AM, Antti Poikola wrote: 

	Hi all, 

	So, are there any examples of what should be written in the general procurement policy or in the individual procument documents? I am really not an procurement expert, but this question is often asked from me, propably because the procurement experts are far from being open data experts. 

	-Jogi 

	On 31.10.2011 8:58, David Eaves wrote: 

		As we go deeper into the stack on this issue, the barriers will shift, so getting open data written into procurement policy is critical. 

	_______________________________________________ 
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	open-government at lists.okfn.org 
	http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government 

-- 
Erik Josefsson
Advisor on Internet Policies
Greens/EFA Group <http://www.greens-efa.eu/36-details/josefsson-erik-138.html> 
GSM: +32484082063
BXL: PHS 04C075 TEL: +3222832667
SBG: WIC M03005 TEL: +33388173776

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Message: 6
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:40:39 +0200
From: Antti Jogi Poikola <antti.poikola at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [open-government] OGD in the IT system procurement cycle
To: JOSEFSSON Erik <erik.josefsson at europarl.europa.eu>,
	open-government at lists.okfn.org
Message-ID:
	<CAPW_oUqRLs1WO_=z6D89TsDFs7ZLeAgr1kyAgJ+oquOS24dM8g at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Good suggestion Eric, we have similar open source guideline in Finland "JHS
169 Use of Open Source software in Public
Administration<http://www.jhs-suositukset.fi/web/guest/jhs/recommendations/169>"
[1]

If Open Data Procurement Guidelines has not been done yet anywhere, it
could be a really useful collaborative project to come out with such
guidelines.

What do you think?

[1] Only in Finnish
http://www.jhs-suositukset.fi/web/guest/jhs/recommendations/169

2011/10/31 JOSEFSSON Erik <erik.josefsson at europarl.europa.eu>

> **
> There is a guideline for how to procure Free Software here:
>
> *Guideline on public procurement of Open Source Software* (revised June
> 2010)
>
> http://www.ychi.leeds.ac.uk/eHealthOS/storage/resources/OSS-procurement-guideline-public-final-June2010-EUPL-FINAL.pdf
>
> I guess it could be forked.
>
> //Erik
>
>
> On 10/31/2011 10:54 AM, Antti Poikola wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> So, are there any examples of what should be written in the general
> procurement policy or in the individual procument documents? I am really
> not an procurement expert, but this question is often asked from me,
> propably because the procurement experts are far from being open data
> experts.
>
> -Jogi
>
> On 31.10.2011 8:58, David Eaves wrote:
>
> As we go deeper into the stack on this issue, the barriers will shift, so
> getting open data written into procurement policy is critical.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> open-government mailing list
> open-government at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government
>
>
>
> --
> Erik Josefsson
> Advisor on Internet Policies
> Greens/EFA Group<http://www.greens-efa.eu/36-details/josefsson-erik-138.html>
> GSM: +32484082063
> BXL: PHS 04C075 TEL: +3222832667
> SBG: WIC M03005 TEL: +33388173776
>
> _______________________________________________
> open-government mailing list
> open-government at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-government
>
>

-- 
Antti "Jogi" Poikola - +358 44 337 5439
--------------------------------------------
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A: http://three.sentenc.es
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Message: 7
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:45:58 +0000
From: P?ll Hilmarsson <pallih at kaninka.net>
Subject: [open-government] NACE rev2 / ISIC4 mappings
To: Open Companies <open-companies at lists.okfn.org>
Cc: open-government at lists.okfn.org
Message-ID:
	<CAM-+hkKYBYGTPnZDn5pPnMMCE14-mJ-Fa2Rx8ZrVYGfMkUB72A at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hi.

I?ve imported mappings for NACE rev2 and ISIC4 classifications into
Scraperwiki, and created an API endpoint here:

https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/nace2_to_isic4/

A quick conversion utility is here:
https://views.scraperwiki.com/run/nace2isic4_display/

A writeup and additional info is available here:
http://bristolpalin.tumblr.com/post/12140397881/isat2008-nace-rev2-isic4-mappings

Comments very much appreciated.

All the best,

P?ll Hilmarsson

-- 
pallih at kaninka.net
http://www.kaninka.net/pallih
http://twitter.com/pallih
http://is.linkedin.com/in/pallih

My email load: http://courteous.ly/KbEbzo

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