Monday 16th March
- Coffee, Registration and Networking
Get your badge, get a coffee, work out how you're going to spend the next day and a half.
- Welcome
Aula Magna
Introduced by: Dana Petcu, West University, Timişoara. [notes] scribes: Daniel & Jan
- Welcome: Prof. Univ. Dr. Marilen Pirtea, Rector of West University of Timişoara
- Radu Puchiu, Secretary of State, Chancellery of the Prime-Minister (Romania)
- Experiences of identifying datasets for sharing, Benedikt Kotmel, Ministry of Finance (Czech Republic) [slides]
- Capturing Best Practices, Chris Harding, The Open Group (Chris will outline what we need to capture from each session) [slides]
- Coffee
- Parallel Sessions A
Come To My Session! Don't know which parallel session to go to? Come to Aula Magna to hear each facilitator describe his/her session in 60 seconds. Don't be late or you'll miss it!
Share-PSI 2.0 Track
Aula Magna
Site scraping techniques to identify and showcase information in closed formats - How do organisations find out what they already publish?
Facilitator: Peter Winstanley, Scottish Government [paper]. Scribe: Benedikt [notes]
This session addresses the question of how organisations that already publish considerable amounts of information on their website but in non-interoperable formats such as Excel and PDF might ‘discover’ what they are publishing and present it in various helpful ways to end users (including the organisation’s own staff) as part of the engagement to discover priorities for open data publication. Illustrations from site scraping of Scottish Government and NHS Scotland will be presented.
Many government and public sector bodies already publish a considerable amount of information including data and reports on their websites. However, this is frequently done under a distributed management process and using content management systems, both of which tend to militate against being able to present in a quick and flexible way the assets of any particular publication format. As a consequence, organisations might find it challenging to know where to start when establishing a programme of converting existing information resources that are not in open formats (1-2 stars on the 5 star model) to more open formats.
Open Track
102
The Electronic Public Procurement System, open data and story telling in Romania
Facilitator: Valentina Dimulescu, Romanian Academic Society
[paper]
Scribe: Johann [notes]
Gaining access and managing public procurement information in Romania by third parties is a strenuous activity. Although the Romanian Government created the online portal under the European Open Data initiative - Digital Agenda for Europe, which includes a section on public procurement, upon accessing public datasets the question arises whether the information provided are affected by human error or malice.
After continuous failed attempts to acquire a database containing complete information on various types of public procurement contracts, The Romanian Academic Society (RAS), a Romanian think tank, concluded that the only way to get systematic access to this type of data is to connect directly to the Romanian Public Procurement Electronic System's (SEAP) server so as to copy the available information. The authors have encountered two major challenges:
- to assemble all the data in a consistent database;
- matching the errata notices to award notices.
Both information collected directly from SEAP and those from CSV files provided by the Government under open data rules contain obvious errors which refer to, among others, the economic agent's country field or absurdly low or high prices. The only manner in which these errors can be corrected is to connect the so-called "errata notices" to its respective award notice. SEAP errata notices containing modifications of errors have not been applied to public procurement open data.
The authors recommend that the newly envisaged online public procurement system (SICAP), financed through European Union development funds, should assume an export module and incorporate standardized errata information in order to correctly export the data base. Still, the publication of this specific Public Sector Information is sensitive, as many corruption cases arise from public procurement contracts.
Open Track
A01
Free Our Maps
Facilitator: Vasile Crăciunescu, Codrina Maria Ilie, Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest [paper] [briefing]. Scribe: Ingo [notes]
Our session is dedicated to the importance of releasing public geodata over the Internet, under an open license and in a reusable format. Geodata is a broad term that refers to data that has a spatial component, defined through various methods, such as pairs of coordinates, name of location, address identifiers and so on. Its usage is wide spread over various domains. Even though world leading business, such as Google, Yahoo, Nokia, Apple and more, have developed services and products that have ultimately and permanently changed the way in which geodata is perceived by the wider community, such as Google Maps; even though the community itself stepped up, building an international network that, in a collaborative, volunteer and open manner, continuously works to build an open map of the world, OpenStreetMap, we do consider that, that there is an immense untapped resource of geospatial information.
That resource is represented by the databases of national agencies and institutions that have produced and collected data within national monitoring networks and research projects for an extensive period of time. For the society, to harvest in the most productive way the benefits of open public geodata, some matters need to be discussed, such as: quality and relevance, different angles of open geodata understanding: public sector, private sector and academia, bridging community driven data with public data, the impact of INSPIRE Directive to open geodata movement, geodata licenses interoperability and technical issues on releasing public geodata as open data.
- Parallel Session A Reports
Aula Magna
Brief (3 minute) summaries from each session, focusing on three questions:
- What X is the thing that should be done to publish or reuse PSI?
- Why does X facilitate the publication or reuse of PSI?
- How can one achieve X and how can you measure or test it?
And the best practices discussed.
- Welcome Reception
Mezzanine Lobby
End of Day 1