EU DATAVIZ 2021: OPEN DATA - 23 NOVEMBER 2021
Welcome address
Hilde Hardeman
Director-General of the Publications Office
Hilde Hardeman, Head of the European Commission's Service for Foreign Policy Instruments, joined the Commission in 1994. She was nominated Director-General of the European Union’s Publication Office in October 2021. Previously, she served as Deputy Head of Cabinet to the Commission Vice-President for Jobs, Growth, Investment and Competitiveness; headed the Commission President’s briefing team; and was in charge of the Units for Relations with Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus. Hilde holds a PhD in Slavic Philology and History of the University of Leuven after studies at Leuven, Stanford University, and Paris. She was visiting professor at the College of Europe.
On 5 October 2021, Hilde was appointed Director-General of the European Union’s inter-institutional Publications Office. She will take up her new function on the 1st of December.
Data and digitalisation at the heart of Luxembourg's innovation
Xavier Bettel
Prime Minister of Luxembourg.
Xavier Bettel was appointed Prime Minister in December 2013. He was reappointed Prime Minister and Minister for Digitalisation, among others, in December 2018. Xavier Bettel was a Member of the Chamber of Deputies between 1999 and 2013. In Parliament, he assumed, among others, the role of vice-chairman of the Legal Affairs Committee and that of vice-chairman of the Committee of Inquiry into the State Intelligence Service. At local level, Xavier Bettel served as Mayor of Luxembourg City between 2011 and until his appointment as Prime Minister in 2013.
The EU data strategy – towards a single European market
The EU data strategy aims to make the European Union a role-model data-driven society where data can flow within the EU and across sectors, for the benefit of all; where European rules, in particular concerning privacy and data protection, as well as competition law, are fully respected; and where the rules for access to and the use of data are fair, practical and clear. Legal instruments and supporting programmes are being put in place to achieve this ambitious objective.
Yvo Volman
Acting Director in the Data directorate of the Directorate-General for Communication Networks, Content and Technology of the European Commission.
Before joining the European Commission in 1998, Yvo worked for the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs in the areas of industrial and technology policy. In the Commission, he has dealt with legislative and strategic issues, along with funding programmes related to the information market, digitisation and data. Yvo holds a PhD in European law awarded by the European University Institute in Florence.
The state of play of open data in Europe
The European Union’s data.europa.eu portal conducts an annual open-data maturity assessment to benchmark national open-data practices in the Member States. The objective of this session is to help you get a better understanding of the current state of play of open data in the EU. To achieve this, we will present the results of the most recent maturity assessment, make a year-to-year comparison of developments, provide context for the results by discussing specific country examples and recap key learnings from the latest assessment reports.
Laura van Knippenberg
Digital transformation consultant, Capgemini Invent
In her role at the European Union’s data.europa.eu portal, Laura supports and coordinates communication with Member States and institutions regarding their open-data publishing and improving the quality of open data, as well as creating and measuring the impact of open data. Since 2020, she has been the lead researcher for data.europa.eu’s annual open-data maturity assessment.
Round table - From data intelligence to decision intelligence
The goal of the round-table discussion is to provide participants with a clear understanding of how to translate data intelligence into decision intelligence, translating data-derived insights into real-world action. Highlighting the different ways data resources can inform or distract day-to-day and strategic decision-making, the session will provide participants with actionable strategies for creating an environment where data can improve how decisions are made in the public’s interest.
Moderated by Stefaan Verhulst
Moderator
Co-founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of the Governance Lab (the GovLab), an action research centre based at New York University
Stefaan Verhulst is also the editor-in-chief of Data Policy, a Cambridge University Press open-access journal; the research director of the MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance; Chair of the Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF; and a member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Business-to-Government Data Sharing. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, Yale University and the Central European University, and serves on numerous advisory boards, including sparks honey and the Center for Media, Data and Society. He is also the founder and curator-in-chief of The Living Library. In 2018, he was recognised as one of the 10 most influential academics in digital government globally (as part of the ‘Top 100 in digital government’) by the global policy platform Apolitical.
Javier de la Torre
Contributor
Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, CARTO
Javier de la Torre is founder and Chief Strategy Officer of CARTO. One of the pioneers of location intelligence, Javier founded the company with a vision to democratize data analysis and visualization. Under his leadership, CARTO has grown from a groundbreaking idea into one of the fastest growing geospatial companies in the world.
Claudia Juech
Contributor
Vice-President of Data and Society, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation
Claudia is a forward-looking strategist, pragmatic optimist, and a builder of programs and organizations. Her career has been all about using data for decision making – first in the financial sector in Germany and more recently at the Rockefeller Foundation, where she and her team used foresight approaches and innovation methodologies to identify the most promising ideas that could be shaped into the next $100M initiative.
Jessica Seddon
Contributor
Global Lead, Air Quality, WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities
Jessica Seddon is the Global Lead for Air Quality at WRI. She leads a team of scientists, strategists, and practitioners who are focused on helping cities and countries manage their air to achieve health, ecosystem, and climate goals. Her own work focuses on the way that new sources of information and environmental awareness can be leveraged to motivate and guide cost-effective strategies for reducing polluting emissions and achieving clean air for all.
Creating open data ecosystems
Moderator Lisa Burke
This session presents proposals that highlight initiatives that contribute to (EU) open-data policies and strategies, with use cases from sectors such as water consumption and procurement.
Towards sustainable open-data ecosystems
The aim of this talk is to introduce a new educational programme on open-data ecosystems to advance current open-data systems towards being true open-data ecosystems that are user driven, circular, inclusive and skills based. The accompanying research agenda could significantly strengthen the achievement of the Berlin Declaration goals and the European Commission’s 2019–2024 priorities on the Green Deal, a Europe fit for the digital age and the data strategy.
Bastiaan van Loenen
Scientific coordinator of the ODECO programme (odeco-research.eu), Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Bastiaan van Loenen is the scientific coordinator of the Horizon 2020 ‘Towards a sustainable open data ecosystem’ (ODECO) programme (https://odeco-research.eu), director of the Knowledge Centre Open Data and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of Delft University of Technology. His current research interests include governance and legal mechanisms stimulating the reuse of geographic information, and (open) data-driven cities.
The European ‘Water health open knowledge’ (WHOW) project
Giorgia will present WHOW – ‘Water health open knowledge’ – an EU Connecting Europe Facility public-open-data-funded project that aims at creating an open knowledge graph capable of linking together, via linked open data standards, data on water consumption and pollution with health parameters and disease diffusion, to be further reused for advanced analyses and the development of innovative services.
Giorgia Lodi
Research assistant at the National Research Council, Italy
Giorgia Lodi is currently a permanent technologist at the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies of the National Council of Research of Italy – Semantic Technology Laboratory. In this context, she is the privacy reference point at the institute. She is a member of European working groups on data semantics and coordinates projects on (open) data management and semantic interoperability. Giorgia holds a PhD in computer science.
Moving towards a public procurement data space
The importance of moving towards a public procurement data space will be discussed, taking into account various perspectives. The panellists will try to answer several key questions relating to the data space, such as: how can it help to better understand EU and national public procurement systems and rules? How can it help to improve data quality? What role will the upcoming eForms and eProcurement Ontology play? Why is open data important for making public procurement more transparent to citizens, NGOs and the academic sector? And finally, how will it help to reach out to more SMEs?
Isabel da Rosa
Team leader, Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs of the European Commission
Isabel Da Rosa currently works as a team leader in the Data and Knowledge for Policy, Business and People unit of the European Commission’s DG Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs. She has over 30 years’ experience in ICT and public administration management, mainly in management positions, including Deputy Secretary-General of the Portuguese Ministry of Public Works, Transport and Communications and Chair of the ICT Committee in the same ministry. She also has more than 13 years’ experience in electronic public procurement systems and has lectured on electronic public procurement at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and the University of Belgrade. Isabel has a PhD in governance frameworks for digital transformation in the public sector, specialising in national defence, and a degree in applied mathematics.
Giovanni Paolo Sellitto
Officer, ICT engineer at the National Anticorruption Authority, Italy
Giovanni Paolo Selitto has been involved since 2006 in the digitalisation and cross-border interoperability of public procurement at the national and EU levels, contributing to setting up the Italian Contract Register and related digital services, ANAC’s Open Data Portal, CEN BII, eSENS, TOOP, the eProcurement Ontology and the PPDS pilot.
Timo Rantanen
Policy officer at the Finnish State Treasury, Finland
Timo Rantanen has worked in public procurement since 2005, first at the national central purchasing body Hansel Oy and then, since May 2021, at the Finnish State Treasury, where he moved to create and develop the national public procurement data space for creating advanced analytics services. Internationally, Timo has assisted several governments and organisations in public procurement development through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Sigma and the World Bank.
Open maps for Europe: accessing official, online, public-sector geospatial open data
‘Open maps for Europe’ will provide easy access to pan-European open data from Europe’s national mapping, cadastral and land-registration authorities. This presentation will demonstrate how users can access the first free-to-use maps, which will be available from the end of summer 2021 via a new online gateway for discovering, viewing, licensing and downloading the data sets. It highlights the authority’s relevance in delivering the European Commission’s policy objectives on open data and the directive on the reuse of public-sector information, which identifies geospatial as a category of high-value data sets. The aim is to encourage greater use of official public-sector geospatial data to drive market development, economic growth and competitiveness.
Angela Baker
Programme manager, data access and integration, FRGS CGeog, EuroGeographics, www.eurogeographics.org
Angela Baker is the data access and integration programme manager for EuroGeographics, an independent not-for-profit organisation representing Europe’s national mapping, cadastral and land-registration authorities. She is responsible for facilitating access to members’ data by managing the production and provision of pan-European data sets, including the ‘Open maps for Europe’ project funded by the Connecting Europe Facility. Angela has worked within the geospatial industry for over 20 years. She has an MA in human geography from Aberdeen University and an MSc in cartography and geo-information technology from Glasgow University, and is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, where she sits on the Professional Advisory Panel.
Data for R&I policy – can data improve the transparency, coordination and benchmarking of policies and results?
This session will show how a series of key policy questions can be addressed by polling R & I-related open data from different sources, such as the EU Open Data Portal, EU funding systems or national CRIS systems, with the help of analytics and data visualisation. We will also highlight the challenges of bringing together data from various sets and ensuring a common understanding of terms, as well as the importance of interoperability guidelines for the success of such an exercise.
Pavel Zbornik
Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, European Commission
Pavel Zborník contributes to reporting on and statistics for EU research and innovation funding programmes, and also provides analyses about trends and derives insights to support policymaking. He has a background in electrical engineering from the Czech Technical University in Prague.
Data for people
Moderator Chris Burns
This session includes proposals that highlight user-oriented approaches and best practices related to citizen engagement in Europe.
The value of nature – the use of greenspaces during SARS-CoV-2 lockdowns
Mobility restrictions in 2020 associated with public-health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic placed constraints on the amount of time people spent outside their homes. We used anonymised and aggregated user-density data from the Facebook Data for Good programme to assess whether people used green spaces in urban settings as usual during these restrictions. We found that during lockdowns people spent more time in locations with green spaces, but the response was complex and differed depending on the level of multiple deprivation of the area.
David Lusseau
Professor of Marine Sustainability at the Technical University of Denmark
David Lusseau is a sustainability scientist developing socioecological system models to identify the best approaches to govern interactions between nature and people in a sustainable manner. He is particularly interested in the management of direct (e.g. wildlife tourism) and indirect (e.g. via disturbances and habitat modification) non-lethal wildlife exploitation to minimise its biodiversity footprint and maximise its public-health and community benefits.
Best practices from 10 years of open data in the Helsinki region
Helsinki Region Infoshare (HRI.fi) is the most innovative open-data service in Finland, and one of the international leaders in the field. This session will highlight the best practices developed on a regional level in the city of Espoo over the last 10 years. We will present HRI’s efforts to enhance data quality and interoperability, and describe our experience with creating an active community of open-data enthusiasts. The HRI’s experience in sharing open data and providing metadata can also be utilised in non-public data management in the public sector. The work of HRI is based on cooperation between four cities and has sparked interest internationally. It has previously been presented across Europe and around the globe. However, this particular contribution has not been offered before.
Minna Joensuu
Deputy Research Director for the city of Espoo, Finland
Minna Joensuu specialises in open data, local government, local politics and strategic management research, with the focus on the interaction between political leaders and public administrators. Her responsibilities include planning and coordinating research activities and open data in which the city of Espoo is involved. She is a member of Helsinki Region Infoshare Steering Group and an open-data enthusiast. Minna has extensive international experience from both studying and working abroad (Austria, Sweden and the United States). Outside of her working life she has facilitated training and organisational development activities, for example for the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. Minna is a PhD candidate in social management sciences.
From a supply-driven towards a more demand-driven open-data policy in the city of Ghent
The city of Ghent runs an open-data portal with over 100 data sets. Joran will talk about the portal’s evolution, which culminated in the launch of a new version in March 2020. He will underline the importance of communication activities in ‘doing’ open data as a city. If people don’t know there is open data, your open data will remain unused and it will be difficult to convince policymakers about its added value. Cities struggle to find ways of getting open data to people (citizens or companies). The city of Ghent wants to inspire other open-data people, cities and governments. Our data lab is a new concept and we want to share the learnings.
Joran Van Daele
Open Data Manager for the city of Ghent, Belgium
Joran Van Daele has a successful record of accomplishments in using city data for open innovation. Through projects and events, Joran helps to promote and maximise the potential of open data in Ghent. As the organiser of the annual AppsForGhent hackathon, and the open-data portal for Ghent, Joran is committed to exploiting the interface between data science and the social good.
Transparency and open data in the service of health in Castile and Leon (Spain)
On 16 March 2020, the Governing Council of Castile and Leon launched a national dashboard to monitor the epidemiological situation of COVID-19 (https://analisis.datosabierto.jcyl.es/pages/coronavirus/). It presents information structured in sections (currently 16), which grew in number and volume as the epidemiological situation evolved. Each section includes indicators, tables, graphs and maps. Explanatory notes help identify the methodology used to obtain data and the documents specifying the applied policies, thus providing true accountability. The portal also features a download section with 33 data sets in different formats. In addition, there is an API query to search and download records with specific criteria. The portal has become the most visited site of the Governing Council of Castile and Leon. In the first 12 months, 4 006 008 separate users made 22 742 570 visits. The presentation will describe the challenges of the project, its objectives and its solutions. It will explain how data is managed and will discuss human and technical resources, how the project was supported financially and the impact it made.
Antonio Ibáñez Pascual
Head of Transparency and Information Reuse, Governing Council of Castile and Leon, Spain
Antonio Ibáñez Pascual is a senior telecommunications engineer with a master’s degree in leadership and public management. For 17 years he has been responsible for the internet presence of the Governing Council of Castile and Leon, and for the past 10 years he has coordinated the open government strategy, including the open-data initiative.
Making census data open, accessible and useful for real people
Next year, the data from the 2021 census of England and Wales will be released and made open to the public. This huge once-in-a-decade data set will offer a rich and detailed snapshot of the socioeconomic fabric of the UK. This presentation will offer an overview of the ongoing data visualisation and data journalism work within the Office for National Statistics to help the public navigate and comprehend this data and the insights embedded within it. The team is in the process of exploring, building and testing various approaches, formats and partnerships to help make this data open, accessible and useful to audiences beyond academics and policymakers.
Ahmad Barclay
Census data visualisation led, Office for National Statistics, United Kingdom
Ahmad Barclay is an architect and UX designer engaged in projects involving data visualisation, visual storytelling and learning through play. Barclay has led award-winning infographics projects as a partner with Visualizing Impact, initiated the open-data project Palestine Open Maps, contributed to a range of publications and facilitated courses and workshops based on his practices in Beirut, London, Lisbon, Amman and Bangalore. He is currently leading data visualisation work for the 2021 census at the Office for National Statistics in the United Kingdom.
Facilitating data reuse
Moderator Jennifer Baker
This session focuses on enabling factors such as the FAIR principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability and reuse) of data, the need for common standards to enable interoperability and the need for data-literacy skills to ensure reuse.
Towards a data-literate society that delivers for all
Data can improve people’s lives when it is used and reused by diverse groups. To ensure that data can be used, it has to be accessible and people have to have the capacity to use it. Since 2012, the World Bank has been supporting low- and middle-income countries by opening government data and increasing the data literacy of diverse groups of stakeholders. In this talk, the presenter will share lessons learned from data-literacy initiatives in more than 30 countries, highlight country examples and publicly available resources that would be of interest to the wider community and discuss challenges and opportunities relating to increasing data use and data literacy.
Ravi Kumar
Team Lead for data use and literacy programme, the World Bank
Ravi Kumar serves as team leader for the Data Use and Literacy program at the World Bank’s Development Data Group in Washington. He specialises in developing data-driven, open-source and user-centred solutions to improve lives across low- and middle-income countries. He is a founder of Code for Nepal and a member of the Asia Society’s Asia 21 Young Leaders. He can be reached on Twitter @RaviNepal.
Data.europa.eu, the official portal for European data
Data.europa.eu, managed by the Publications Office of the European Union, is the official portal for European data. It is the central point of access to open data from EU, national, regional and local public administrations. In total, it gathers over 1 million datasets from 6 EU institutions, 79 agencies and bodies, 36 countries and other international organisations. As a result, it facilitates and promotes reuse and data interoperability, linking data between different portals. Apart from this rich data catalogues, the portal is the gateway to the open data community, providing free access to learning material, the latest news, successful stories of open data and much more.
Esther Huyer
Digital Transformation Manager for data strategy and data policy at Capgemini Invent
In her work for the European Commission’s data.europa.eu portal and Support Centre for Data Sharing, Esther Huyer and her team aim at increasing the impact of data via trusted collaborations. By engaging with public and private organisations and academia, she encourages successful data sharing for a common European data space and policymaking, both in the EU and globally. Her interest lies in data-informed solutions for mobility, health and financial services, linking economic, political and social stakeholders.
Raymonde Weyzen
Consultant, Data strategy and Policy at Capgemini Invent
Raymonde is part of the data strategy and data science team at Capgemini Invent. As a consultant, she is heavily involved in two European Union projects: data.europa.eu and the Support Centre for Data Sharing. Together with her team, she leads the communication streams for both projects and engages with organisations in the open data and data sharing domain. She is inspired by successful data sharing initiatives, open data applications, and European frameworks that facilitate the exchange and publication of digital information.
Turning open data into open knowledge
The Open Knowledge Foundation will share lessons learned from 17 years of open-data advocacy, publishing, tooling and training. Following the transposition of the EU’s directive on open data and the reuse of public-sector information in July 2021, we will talk about the future of our technical products and the work that our team is doing to ensure that open data is used – by providing training, developing services and building open-source tools so anyone can turn open data into open knowledge.
Renata Ávila
CEO, The Open Knowledge Foundation
Renata is an international lawyer, author and advocate. She brings nearly 20 years of experience in access to knowledge, freedom of expression, policymaking and global digital rights. Renata is an Affiliate with the Stanford Institute of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Renata is part of the World Economic Forum Expert Network on Digital Technologies and a member of the Global Board of Trustees of Digital Future Society, among other affiliations in a vast professional network extending across Europe, Latin America and North America. She co-founded the Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms, the Progressive International and the Polylateral Association - an international platform cooperative for knowledge workers.
The current state of national metadata - how to unlock open data benefits
Metadata from leading countries’ portals were analysed according to globally recognised indices in terms of open-data initiatives. Our findings suggest that there is still a lot of room for improvement and that key open government data (OGD) administrators, officers and users must be aware of these important gaps.
Barbara Šlibar
Faculty of Organization and Informatics, Varaždin, Croatia
Barbara Šlibar is a PhD candidate in social sciences in the field of information sciences at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her main research interests include open data and business decision-making. She has published several papers in academic journals and has presented her work at international conferences.
Enrique Mu
Professor of Management at Carlow University, United States
Enrique Mu is a Professor of Management at Carlow University. He has published more than 50 articles in academic journals and is editor-in-chief of the International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Enrique has lectured and presented his work in Croatia, Germany, Mexico and elsewhere. He holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh.
Data science in the fight against COVID-19: the Valencian experience
In this talk, Nuria will describe the work done since March 2020 in the use of open data (data science) in the fight against COVID-19. Nuria led a multidisciplinary team of more than 20 volunteer scientists – the team that won the 500k XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge – who developed predictive models for the pandemic curve in 236 countries/regions of the world and launched a worldwide COVID-19 citizen survey, collecting over 600000 answers to date. Nuria will highlight the key results and share the lessons learned from this initiative of collaboration between civil society as a whole (through the survey), the scientific community (through the expert group) and a public administration (through the commissioner at the level of the presidency).
Nuria Oliver
Co-founder and Vice-President of ELLIS, the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems
Nuria Oliver is also the Commissioner to the President of the Valencian government on artificial-intelligence strategy and data science against COVID-19, and Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance. Nuria earned a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Academia Europaea. She has over 25 years of research experience in human-centric artificial intelligence and is the author of over 160 widely cited scientific articles, as well as being the holder of more than 40 patents and a public speaker. Nuria’s work is regularly featured in the media, and she has received numerous awards, including the Spanish National Computer Science Award and the MIT TR100 (now the TR35) Young Innovator Award (she was the first Spanish scientist to receive this award). She was named Data Scientist of the Year 2020 by ESRI and received the 2021 King Jaume I Award in New Technologies. She recently co-led ValenciaIA4COVID, the team that won the 500k XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge.
Closing speech
Pascal Leardini
Deputy Secretary-General, Chief Operating Officer of the European Commission
Pascal Leardini is Deputy Secretary-General and Chief Operating Officer of the European Commission since May 2019. Mr Leardini joined the internal market department of the Commission in 1994, where he was appointed Head of Unit in 2002. In 2005, he joined the Secretariat-General. Since 2014, he has been serving as Director in different functions, including interinstitutional relations, institutional and administrative policies, better regulation and corporate governance. He holds a Master’s degree in law from the Catholic University Louvain-La-Neuve and a Master in European Llw from the College of Europe (Bruges).