Berlin Workshop: Maximising interoperability — core vocabularies, location-aware data and more

Call for Participation

Interoperability · Location · European Data Portal · Smart Cities

The fifth and final workshop in the Share-PSI series will address the topic of maximising interoperability: core vocabularies, location-aware data and more. The workshop is explicitly interested in ideas, concepts and solutions that directly or indirectly address the interoperability of open data and PSI. As with all Share-PSI workshops, the aim is to identify best practices in these areas with a focus on Public Sector Information, although cultural heritage, commercial and scientific data are also relevant.

The successful usage of open data depends on its availability and, in many cases, on the degree of its interoperability. The following crucial factors have to be met:

  1. staff at public authorities with different technical experience have to be able to increase the discoverability and interoperability of their datasets;
  2. public authorities should make it easy to combine datasets from different sources, different member states or different domains;
  3. public authorities should be aware of the tools in most common use to import, process and visualise data;
  4. public authorities should refer to locations in a consistent manner to enable the combination of multiple datasets that refer to the same place.

Participants can expect to engage and share expertise with others interested improving especially, but not only, the technical aspects of PSI interoperability.

Workshop Aims

The aim of Share-PSI is to identify good practice in open data/PSI, providing public authorities and others with a set of best practices that can be incorporated into their own guidelines. This workshop will focus particularly on questions related to technical implementation, with this in mind, these are the questions and topics we would like to see addressed during presentations and workshop sessions. The list is not exhaustive but should give a clearer idea about the workshops aims:

  • How can existing vocabularies be used to provide semantic interoperability?
  • How can data publishers be supported in maximising the interoperability of their data sets within and across domains?
  • As location is often the common point between different datasets, how should location be represented?
  • How can public authorities support multilingualism?
  • How can the technical interoperability of datasets be maximised?
  • How can public authorities publish data that will be persistent, i.e. still be available after the particular project or department that created it has ceased to exist?

Workshop Organisation

Share-PSI workshops are highly interactive with a minimum of presentations. The bulk of the time is devoted to parallel sessions in which specific topics are discussed under the direction of a facilitator (see below). Related sessions will be presented as workshop tracks so that those sessions won't overlap. The specific tracks for the Berlin event are:

  • interoperability between Smart Cities;
  • working with location data;
  • aspects of the European Data Portal;

Before each set of parallel sessions, facilitators will have 1 minute of plenary time to present their topic and encourage delegates to 'come to my session.' See the evolving agenda.

Participation

Participation is free.

The workshop is hosted by Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (Fraunhofer FOKUS). There are several ways to participate:

Share your best practice. You have identified a process of data publication that you and stakeholders consider as outstanding in enhancing interoperability? You have indentified a standard, or set of standards and tools that enhance interoperability? You managed to combine multiple datasets to create something new and innovative? You tried to use one or more datasets but found it especially hard becauseā€¦ ? You have experience in relating data to locations?

Share your experiences with the Share-PSI partners. Use the template on the project wiki as far as possible. Your contribution may be edited by the Share-PSI project partners and eventually published as a Share-PSI best practice. You can discuss your best practice during the workshop by proposing a dedicated session on the topic you described.

Deadline: ongoing

Lead a session. This entails facilitating a discussion around your experience. It may begin with a short set up presentation, based on a paper that will be published by Share-PSI, but the vast majority of the time should be allocated for discussion.

Please be specific in what you propose and clearly state:

  • the problem/issue you are going to address;
  • the expected outcome of the workshop;
  • the intended audience;
  • the moderation methods you plan to use, if applicable; (optional)
  • the facilities you require (optional).

Facilities provided by the host include projector, flip-board, markers, paper. Please note that if you are proposing a workshop which should be interactive in nature and not a speech.

It is paramount to have the main points of the workshop collected in written form. Ask one of the participants to be a scribe or bring a colleague who will scribe. Audio or Video-recordings do not qualify as a workshop outcome.

Deadline for submission of session proposals:

Submit a paper for a plenary. Papers, up to a maximum of 5 pages in length, are invited for consideration as the basis of a plenary presentation. Papers should be submitted in a non-proprietary format (HTML, PDF, ePub etc.) no later than the deadline below. Please include an abstract of the paper in your e-mail. Submissions by more than one author are welcome.

Deadline:

Submissions

Whether offering a best practice, an interactive session or a plenary paper, please send your submission via e-mail to share-psi-berlin@fokus.fraunhofer.de.

Pitch a barcamp session. This requires no action from you now. Before lunch break on day 2 of the workshop, we will give you room to propose an ad hoc topic you wish to present/discuss after lunch. Space will be provided for you to host the barcamp session. This is the right style for contribution for topics which emerge during day 1 of the workshop.

All selected contributions and associated slides will be published in the Share-PSI 2.0 Web site after the announcement of results under a CC-BY licence. By submitting documents entitled for publication you agree that your contributions will be published under that permissive license.

Session proposals and plenary papers will be subject to review by the Programme Committee. Closely related session proposals and plenary presentations will be grouped together so that submitters will need to decide ahead of time who will actually lead the session, which is likely to last approximately one hour.

Whatever the specific topic of the session or talk, we're looking for answers to three questions:

  1. What X is the thing that should be done to publish or reuse PSI?
  2. Why does X facilitate the publication or reuse of PSI?
  3. How can one achieve X and how can you measure or test it?

Call for collocation

The Share-PSI 2.0 partners encourage other groups to propose sessions and perhaps hold face to face meetings in Berlin around the time of the workshop in November 2015.

The Berlin workshop, with its highly interactive format across multiple tracks, is a perfect place to boost your project's dissemination activities.

Dates

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Venue

The workshop is hosted by Fraunhofer FOKUS,
Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 31
10589 Berlin,
Germany.

(Venue information)

Questions? Please contact Yury Glikman, Fraunhofer FOKUS workshop host.

Registration

Registration is open