Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - OpenGovIntelligence (Fostering Innovation and Creativity in Europe through Public Administration Modernization towards Supplying and Exploiting Linked Open Statistical Data)

Teaser

Governments are changing the way they interact with the public. Instead of providing services, they move towards co-creation in which governments, companies, citizens and other parties collaborate in all aspect of service development and provisioning to create user-centric...

Summary

Governments are changing the way they interact with the public. Instead of providing services, they move towards co-creation in which governments, companies, citizens and other parties collaborate in all aspect of service development and provisioning to create user-centric services. This transforms the landscape of public administrations in which they traditionally perform their own tasks and do not cooperate with others. Co-creation crosses organizational boundaries and innovations should not be limited by organizational structures and institutional constraints.
Linked Open Statistical Data (LOSD) can help governments, companies and citizens to provide more insight in societal developments and relationships. For example, this data can show the pollution in an area, but also the sources of the pollutions and the changes that have happened over time. In this way providing deep insight that can be used by policy-makers, but also provide insight for the public which can be used by them to ask questions and influence policies. Although this data is available is often distributed over siloed data sources that store data in heterogeneous formats. Collecting and linking this data is often challenging which hinders the creation of new insights. Once the data can be combined visualization in such a way that the results are easy to understand is of vital importance.
The overall objectives of the OpenGovIntelligence project are to:
Create a co-creation framework for LOSD-driven pubic services
Develop tools that will support the integration of LOSD and facilitate the development of LOSD-driven services based on advanced visualisations and analytics methods.
Apply LOSD-driven public service co-creation in real world settings in order to create added value services in six European countries in various problem areas.
Towards this end, the OpenGovIntelligence follows an iterative approach with three rounds of development and evaluation. During this reporting period, the first round has been completed.

Work performed

The OpenGovIntelligence Framework takes a hard systems based approach and uses object process methodology to develop a model of the OpenGovIntelligence co-creation system.
A number of software tools that enable publishing, linking, and reusing LOSD: (i) CubiQL - A GraphQL service for querying Linked Data Cubes, (ii) JSON API For Data Cube (Specification & Implementation), (iii) Table2QB and Grafter, (iv) Data Cube Builder, (v) Assisted Cube Schema Creator, (vi) Data Cube RDF Validator, (vii) Data Cube Aggregator, (viii) LOSD Machine Learning Component, (ix) Data Cube Explorer, (x) SPARQL Connector for Exploratory, (xi) Data Science Studio SPARQL plugin.
The OpenGovIntelligence operated six pilot projects.
The aim of the Trafford pilot was to help support Jobcentre Plus teams in Greater Manchester who deliver services that help people into work by co-creating web applications that visualise linked open statistical data on worklesness.
The Flemish pilot converted 7 years of environmental reporting by companies on emissions and waste to RDF data cubes and linked these with other datasets. A citizen-oriented web application, as defined during the co-creation phase, has been developed and brought into production.
The Marine Institute pilot LOSD-driven service visualizes data collected by the Irish Data Buoy Network. This is a network of weather and wave buoys returning environmental measurements of climatological and wave conditions from around the Irish coasts.
The Lithuanian pilot designed a one-stop, easy-to-use, market research tool that helps entrepreneurs and investors analyse and compare the business environment at the municipal level.
The purpose of the Estonian pilot was to fight information asymmetry in the real estate market and provide an easy way to access real estate data.
The Greek Pilot aimed at improving the internal decision-making process in the policy sector of Government Vehicles by means of Linked Open Statistical Data.
Swirrl intends to adopt a business model in which the OpenGovIntelligence toolkit and methodology for LOSD are integrated into a software product.
The online videos, tutorials, papers, online courses and presentations produced by the project to raise skills and awareness remain available and can be used.

Final results

\"Although all pilots contributed to the successful completion of the project, three of them had the most significant impact.
Within the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Trafford Council has been leading on the Skills, Employment & Worklessness programme. The Trafford pilot was designed around the need to bring datasets together and visualise them in order to help identify areas of need and inform service delivery.The outputs from the pilot were produced through an iterative co-creation process involving all partners to ensure they met their requirements. The involvement of end-users at every stage of development from initiation to production ensured that the apps had the required features and datasets. After seeing a prototype application one Jobcentre Plus manager reported, \"\"I\'m amazed that that is the result of the [co-creation] workshop because I didn\'t feel that I contributed that much [...] However, if you\'d ask me after what it is that I wanted that is it.\"\"
The Flemish pilot had a huge impact on the ICT side. The modeling approaches, components, software, guidelines and best practices developed in the pilot have been integrated in the default ICT architecture that every application of the Department needs to follow and implement. Every future application will contain linked open data publishing as integral part of the application. There has been also an impact on the open data awareness. Due to the encountered issues lots of discussions are going on about opening up data, data quality and validation, data integration, and how departments should work together on these issues. Finally, the LOSD-driven public service has been used by civil servants to find outliers in the data. These findings exposed some flaws in the reported data, which lead to the conclusion that the data as such could not be exposed as open data to avoid incorrect reporting in the press and social media.
The Marine Institute pilot service visualizes data collected by the Irish Data Buoy Network. Ireland has two marine renewable energy device test sites; one in Galway Bay, which due to its location has conditions approximately ¼ scale of the neighbouring open Atlantic coast and, one off the coast of Belmullet in Co. Mayo on the North West coast that is exposed to the full scale conditions experienced by the Atlantic Coast. Both sites host wave buoys and the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) has deployed a wave buoy in a site off the Co. Clare coast as part of a project to determine the prevailing environmental wave conditions in this location. All these data are managed by the Marine Institute. Data are received from the data buoys at 30 or 60 minute intervals through a real-time network and the full resolution data are available from the Marine Institute’s ERDDAP data server API. The service will be added to the Ireland’s Digital Ocean as the “Ocean Energy” dashboard and the Sustainable Energy Authority Ireland (SEAI) want to make the dashboard the central feature of a revamped Ocean Energy Ireland website to be released later this year.




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Website & more info

More info: http://opengovintelligence.eu.