Michael was involved in ENGAGE from the beginning but after the first review he was seconded from STFC to a position in the UK government department responsible for research.

We will all remember Michael as a sharp-minded, honest and charismatic person, who never failed to impress with his excellent contributions and interventions at critical points during the project. Always an active and reliable member of our consortium, Michael has been credited with invaluable contributions which will be remembered for their pertinence, insight and remarkable results.

Besides his professional qualities, Michael touched everyone with his kind personality and altruism. He always found extra time and dedicated effort to give personal advice and guidance to his colleagues, for and beyond the scope of the project.

Michael was a distinguished colleague that all of us valued and treasured. Indeed we will all miss him, and our thoughts are with his family and friends who suffer more.

Rest in Peace Michael.

You will be sadly missed.

Open data have the potential to enable different types of innovation, such as innovation through the provision, processing and use of open data, innovation through open data technologies, and innovation through impact and public value creation from open data initiatives (transparency, accountability and collaborative governance approaches). Open data can contribute to open government. However, although open data research is performed increasingly, research about the way innovation can take place through open data is still lacking. For this reason, innovation through open data is the main focus of this Special Issue.

To those who are interested: more information about the call can be found in the CfP brochure or via http://www.jtaer.com/. Please note that the deadline for submissions is 1 August 2013.

After the release of the 1st version of the ENGAGE platform in 2012, the ENGAGE consortium has worked hard to release ENGAGE v2.0 with new and improved features and architecture.

A key motivation for those changes and additions were the results and feedback of the project’s extensive user engagement and evaluation efforts.

In an effort to make ENGAGE v2.0 attractive and user-friendly and to maximize the potential of Open Government Data for the target communities, there has been a thorough makeover of the user interface. Moreover, the core of the ENGAGE platform has been strengthened by switching from a flat-metadata schema to a richer, semantically enhanced ENGAGE meta-data model. The aim is for ENGAGE to seamlessly interoperate with a number of PSI repositories through appropriate transformation engines.

Namely, some of the functionalities of ENGAGE v2.0 are:

• Single Sign On
• Dataset extension / curation graph
• Elastic & filtered dataset search
• Dataset download/upload and simplified meta-data definition
• Data visualisation
• Dataset request from data publishers (e.g. public authorities) and the community
• Display of provenance information

Also, social networking and rating features have been added, such as:

• Formation of end user groups/communities
• Comments and discussions on original or derived datasets
• Approval/disapproval and rating of datasets as a quality indicator

The above features position ENGAGE as a centralized and collaborative PSI e-Infrastructure providing the necessary tools for dataset processing and acquisition and differentiate it from a simple repository of open public datasets. It will be an intelligent social and collaborative space for researchers, data journalists, citizens and other potential end users, who rely on open public data for professional or personal (re-)use.

Become a member the growing community of ENGAGE and contribute to the creation and proliferation of high-quality Open Data for researchers and citizens. Register at: www.engagedata.eu.

Future development plans

The ENGAGE development team continuously enhances the platform so that the upcoming versions will include new features such as: a Point System to reward participation and peer acceptance, ScraperWiki integration, openRefine extension, Interoperability with existing popular repositories (e.g. CKAN-based), an ENGAGE API to search and retrieve meta-data, better visualization features and more.

Meanwhile, the consortium is populating the platform with high-quality datasets and engaging end users to initiate group creations, collaborations and PSI (re-)use.

The ultimate goal of ENGAGE is the development and use of a data infrastructure and collaborative environment, incorporating distributed and diverse public sector information (PSI) resources, capable of supporting scientific collaboration and research, while also empowering the deployment of open governmental data towards citizens.

Experts Scientific Committee, project liaisons and events

During the past year ENGAGE created concrete collaborations with other EU-funded projects and initiatives in the e-Infrastructures and Open Data domains such as LOD2, CHAIN-REDS, CLARIN, OpenAIREplus and CITADEL. Currently, five projects have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with ENGAGE, which outlines the nature of collaboration.

In addition, the project maintains an active collaboration with experts of international caliber from commercial and academic institutions, who constitute the ENGAGE Experts Scientific Committee (ESC). The ESC provides strategic advice on the project’s sustainability and competitive advantage, and also provides insight into the new developments of the ENGAGE platform and its services.

In an effort to further strengthen its bonds with current associates and reach out to prospective end user communities, ENGAGE is co-organising the 4th Samos Summit. This event, titled “Samos 2013 Summit on Digital Innovation for Government, Business and Society”, will take place at the Greek island of Samos, on 1 – 5 July 2013. This year, the Samos Summit will also include the 1st International Summer School on Open and Collaborative Governance, which will provide students with the opportunity to be trained in various Gov2.0 issues, including Open Data.

Until the Samos 2013 Summit, ENGAGE is planning to participate in various other events. More details on events can be found in the project’s agenda.

• LOD2
• CHAIN-REDS
• CLARIN
• CITADEL… on the Move

The MoU’s outline the type and level of collaboration between ENGAGE and each project, covering sharing of expertise and technologies, co-participation/organisation of events and user engagement activities.

The photo shows ENGAGE Project Manager Dr. Spiros Mouzakitis and CHAIN-REDS Coordinator Prof. Frederico Ruggieri signing the MoU

Abstract:  Public  and  private  organizations  increasingly  release  their  data  to  gain  benefits  such  as  transparency  and economic growth. The use of these open data can be supported and stimulated by providing considerable metadata (data about  the  data),  including  discovery,  contextual  and  detailed  metadata.  In  this  paper  we  argue  that  metadata  are  key enablers  for  the  effective  use  of  Linked  Open  Data  (LOD).  We  illustrate  the  potential  of  metadata  by  1)  presenting  an overview of advantages and disadvantages of metadata derived from literature, 2) presenting metadata requirements for LOD architectures derived from literature, workshops and a questionnaire, 3) describing a LOD metadata architecture that meets the requirements and 4) showing examples of the application of this architecture in the ENGAGE project. The paper shows that using metadata with the appropriate metadata architecture can yield considerable benefits for LOD publication and  use,  including  improving  find  ability,  accessibility,  storing,  preservation,  analysing,  comparing,  reproducing,  finding inconsistencies,  correct  interpretation,  visualizing,  linking  data,  assessing  and  ranking  the  quality  of  data  and  avoiding unnecessary duplication of data. The Common European Research Information Format (CERIF) can be used to build the metadata architecture and achieve the advantages.

The article can be downloaded here, from the eJournal of eDemocracy & Open Government (JeDEM) website.

Results

In total, 307 persons started answering questions in this survey and 151 persons completed the survey. Most respondents were actual open data users (84%) and some were potential open data users. The results reported below concern the answers of actual users of open public sector data. Insufficient potential users answered the questionnaire to obtain valid results. The results below include information of persons who finished the survey as well as persons who did not finish the survey.

Background of respondents

About three-quarters of the respondents who used open public sector data were man and about three-quarters was between 26 and 50 years old. Most respondents work in social sciences, mainly in political science, public administration, sociology and other social science domains.

Current use of open public sector data

The respondents mainly used social data (74%), geographic data (67%) and business data (45%). Open data are mainly used monthly or a few times per month, yearly or a few times per year or weekly. Many different websites are used to gather open public sector data, but data.gov and data.gov.uk are used by many respondents.

Respondents were asked which purposes were important for their use of open public sector data. Most listed purposes were assessed as important or very important by the majority of the respondents. For instance, performing a statistical analysis and writing an academic publication were assessed as very important reasons to use open public sector data (by 44% and 42% of the respondents respectively). News reporting and daily operation in work were viewed as less important.

User requirements

Respondents were asked to which extent they were able to perform a number of actions when they use open public sector data. The actions that were assessed as difficult by the majority of the respondents were: 1) discovering and browsing datasets across local, national and international datasets in the own language, 2) processing data by linking them to other data, 3) processing data by linking metadata, 4) providing feedback on the data by rating the data (e.g. rating the quality of the data), 5) providing feedback to the data producer by putting needs for open public sector data and 6) getting training on the use of open public sector data. The actions that were assessed as easy or very easy by the majority of the respondents were 1) searching (e.g. searching for data by typing keywords in a search engine), 2) downloading open public sector data and 3) processing by analyzing the data. Other actions were assessed as neither easy, nor difficult.

The answers to this question were compared with the actions that were assessed as very useful by the majority of the open data users, including searching (e.g. searching for data by typing keywords in a search engine), searching by using an API, finding (getting the data you are looking for), finding by the use of metadata, finding linked publications and other linked material in which certain datasets are already used, discover and browse datasets across local, national and international datasets in the own language, downloading open public sector data, processing data, processing by linking the data, processing by linking metadata, processing by visualizing data in tables, maps and charts, processing by analyzing the data. Actions that were assess as useful include downloading supplementary open data (e.g. metadata), providing feedback to the data producer by putting needs for open data, uploading datasets, uploading processed, enhanced, extended, harmonised, anonymised, annotated and/or linked versions of existing datasets, viewing usage statistics and getting training on the use of open public sector data.

Comparing the difficult actions with the useful actions, shows the most important user requirements for open public sector data, namely 1) discovering and browsing datasets across local, national and international datasets in the own language, 2) processing data by linking them to other data, 3) processing data by linking metadata, 4) providing feedback to the data producer by putting needs for open public sector data and 5) getting training on the use of open public sector data.

Metadata

Approximately three-quarters of all open data users stated that they also used metadata (data about the data). The majority of the respondents stated that metadata always make reusing data easier, always make the interpretation of data easier, always make searching and browsing data easier and always make linking data easier. However, these benefits are often not obtained from the use of metadata, as several problems are noticed. Often there are insufficient metadata and therefore it is difficult to interpret the data, often there are insufficient data about the data quality, often there are insufficient metadata about data gathering and measuring and often metadata have no structure and are therefore difficult to search and browse. Over 70% of the respondents stated that they would like to have the following types of metadata when they use open data: description of the dataset, title of dataset, creator of dataset, country where the dataset was created, source of dataset, format of dataset, keywords/tags in dataset, geographical or spatial coverage of dataset, temporal coverage of dataset, linked datasets, data collection period and completeness of the dataset.

In this article, based on data collected through interviews and a workshop, the benefits and adoption barriers for open data have been derived. The results suggest that a conceptually simplistic view is often adopted with regard to open data, which automatically correlates the publicizing of data with use and benefits. Also, five “myths” concerning open data are presented, which place the expectations within a realistic perspective. Further, the recommendation is provided that such projects should take a user’s view.

The paper entitled ‘Issues and guiding principles for opening governmental judicial research data’ is published by Springer and identifies guidelines and principles for helping governments to open their data.

http://www.egov-conference.org/egov-2012/outstanding-paper-awards-1

ENGAGE WS I : Open Data Requirements

During the first, titled “WS I : Open Data Requirements”, Anneke Zuiderwijk – Van Eijk (Delft University of Technology), Charalampos Alexopoulos (University of AEGEAN) and Marijn Janssen (Delft University of Technology) exchanged knowledge and ideas with the audience about the status of open data, its benefits and challenges and user requirements.

Participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire about requirements of open data users and to write down on post-itsthe three requirements of open data users that are most important according to them. Then, all post-its were gathered, discussed with the participants, and organized in categories, such as functional and non-functional requirements. Finally, the organizers of the workshop presented the interim results of the questionnaire and put forward several propositions, which provided the basis for an interactive discussion among all participants. The requirements that were derived during the workshop will be used to further specify the e-infrastructure for open data that is being developed in the ENGAGE project.

ENGAGE WS II: The ENGAGE Open Data Prototype

At the second, titled “WS II: The ENGAGE Open Data Prototype” the ENGAGE first release of the platform prototype has been demonstrated by Spyros Mouzakitis and Harry Tsavdaris of NTUA.

The workshop was conducted in order to gather feedback from potential users and discover the priorities for ENGAGE. Initially, a live demonstration of the current prototype was performed, followed by a visual presentation of the plans for the next release. The 20 attendees were then asked to fill in a questionnaire and use an online feedback tool where they could comment freely and suggest new ideas for the ENGAGE Services infrastructure. Based on their input, support for the data curation process and the implementation of collaboration utilities were marked as the most important, and most commented, features for the next release. Furthermore, users provided ideas for the enhancement of data visualization tools, as well as on improvements for searching and filtering datasets.

ENGAGE WS III: New visions and ideas for Open Data and Governance

The third workshop titled “WS III: New visions and ideas for Open Data and Governance” was animated by Elias Kalapanidas and Yannis Charalambidis started with the presentation of Nigel Shadbolt of the University of Southampton under the same title. This served as a nice provocation for the next session, where each participant identified the 3 most promising ideas for open data and governance. The consolidated results were clustered in 3 categories: Privacy and Trust, Technology, Business, and are presented below.

Privacy and Trust

• Truly free licensing of open data
• A new IP rights management framework for open data.  Who is the “owner” of open data should be clear (liability to maintain data)
• Anonymisation methods needed
• Restriction of data combination (for data where individual  identity can be “derived”)
• Privacy should be extended to Internet of Things (e.g. data sent by your car)
• Harmonisation of legal frameworks (pan-European)

Technology

• Multilingual metadata & UI for open data access (do not forget language technologies, publication)
• Take into account existing ontologies in scientific communities
• Real-time streaming of data (IoT, WoT)
• Machine understandable meta-knowledge made by non-experts
• A single access API for all open data
• Simple open standards for datasets (for complex documents,  charts, etc)
• Better metadata for discovery AND processing
• Quality of open data: history, provenance

Business

• Budget constraints for open data (barrier)
• Policy for creating open data demand by citizens and scientists
• Blend open data and innovation.  Make new apps for (smart) cities, crossborder apps, etc.
• Create value for policy makers (though apps based on open data)
• Think of ENGAGE USP’s in view of existing national open data portals
• Find and make the killer apps
• Make a “full open data” experiment ?
• Include Enterprises as open data providers (new direction)
• Make money out of open data – business models (e.g. who is the owner?: for PSI, us. For Private SI: the enterprises)

The results of the 3 workshops are driving forth the next release of the ENGAGE open data infrastructure that will be published early in 2013. Until then, please stay tuned.