Many of Norway's State organisations are seeing the potential and reaping the benefits from opening up their data and adopting a data sharing culture. In this paper we present some examples of innovation and efficiency-gains in the Norwegian public sector that are results of opening up data.

The paper explores some early examples of direct benefits for the public sector itself from opening up data. These are:

• Benefit 1: Design for sharing improves efficiencies – from integration-mess slowdown to sharing-induced agility.
• Benefit 2: Improved Data quality and Service Delivery.
• Benefit 3: Data sharing within the public sector provides for great savings

Open Government Data in Austria is characterized by a collaboration of the willing and capable, as well as direct community involvement which happens at various levels along the data publication line. Early and direct community involvement is regarded as one substantial key success factor of OGD in Austria. This paper describes some of the noteworthy measures to spark open data usage as well as first visible effects of changed administrative and external processes and procedures since the inception of OGD.

Supervizor, is an online application that provides information on business transactions of the public sector bodies. Designed and developed by Slovenia’s Commission for the Prevention of Corruption, it by now contains 50 million transactions from both government and local agencies to government contractors from 2003 to 2014 and matches such transactions to company records from the Business Register, including director lists and corporate leadership. In 2013 Supervizor won the United Nations Public Service Award, an important recognition of excellence in public service. The transactions data from Supervisor are also provided in machine-readable form.

The value of the public data being made available for reuse is becoming increasingly acknowledged not only by the private sector but also by the public entity that generates them. For this reason, more and more public entities are creating their own open data spaces in which to gradually expand the volume of information being made available to reusers.

These different spaces - which, generally speaking, comprise a series of unconnected islands - now require a single point where all the published information can be permanently and automatically referenced. In order to meet this need, the team responsible for the Aporta Project is developing a National Catalogue of Reusable Public Information at datos.gob.es and is publishing Technical Interoperability Standards on the Reuse of Information Resources. These two measures make it possible to develop a catalogue federation tool to enable automatic publication in the National Catalogue of the metadata corresponding to the data sets published on the websites of each public entity. A global index of reusable public information is thus created and can be accessed by companies or any member of the public to locate reusable data without the need to know and find the website of the public entity holding the data of interest to them.

The catalogue federation tool, which is being developed in PHP as an extension of the National Catalogue, ensures maximum coherence between the information being made available by the public entities in their own catalogues and the National Catalogue itself.

This solution enables the existence of a global reuse scenario that provides greater visibility for the public data made available by the three levels of government (central, regional and local), as well as a general overview of how public sector information is being reused in Spain.

Governments increasingly prioritise their investments in Open Government Data on the basis of the value that can be unlocked by opening up government datasets. For example, the G8 Member States, including the EU, committed to the opening up and publishing high-value datasets with priority. This was formalised in the G8 Open Data Charter and the individual action plans of the G8 Member States and the EU. In the context of Action 1.1 of the Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA) Programme of the European Commission, we elaborated on a working definition for high-value datasets through different dimensions, both from the perspective of the data publisher and data re-user. We used this working definition for identifying and prioritising datasets owned by European Institutions to be listed on the European Union Open Data Portal (EU ODP). This will allow EU institutions to determine which new datasets to be published with priority or for which high-value datasets already listed on the EU ODP, the reusability should be improved with priority.

Imagine a city where public decision-making is easy for all to follow and comment on using any digital channel. A solution to this challenge is being sought in Helsinki, which has long been working to unlock the data reserves related to municipal decision-making

In this contribution, we :

• develop the feedback (REX) of French regional authorities about Opendata;
• present organization that was established en France to cope with Opendata weakness;
• analyse the importance of data’s standardization on national or global scale and the particular case of «traffic information»;
• finally propose actions for regional authority in France.

This document reflects the benefits of the use of Public Sector Information through the successful case of the Public Transport information released by the City of Gijón. Although, at the beginning, local government was reluctant to open its data, now all the sectors take advance of the reuse of PSI: industry produces Web applications and widgets for citizens; restaurants installed display systems to inform customers; a local artist created a multimedia artwork based on this public information. The most relevant and remarkable action has been implemented by the local government which is reusing their own Open Data, saving potentially €0.8m (4% of the total budget for transport) in the installation of display systems.

In this paper we describe the evolution and development of the police.uk and data.police.uk sites, which publish open data about crime and justice in the UK, and make it accessible and comprehensible to the public. Police.uk has received over 60 million visits (675 million hits) since launching in January 2011. Open crime and justice data represents a key sector in the UK open data market, and citizens are keen to engage with the criminal justice system to become more informed about local levels of crime and other policing information. We are presenting a paper that sets out the policing context in the UK and discusses the journey in providing such open data, the processes involved and challenges encountered and possible future developments.

The incident firefighters are being sent to are by nature unpredictable, otherwise they would have been prevented. Once on the scene firefighters are expected to march into action there is not much time to deliberate on the perfect action to be taken, it will always be the most suitable based on the knowledge and the decision time. With the wealth of open data becoming available from the governments there are several new opportunities and threats for fire fighters to be considered.

The treasure waiting to be discovered here is the big investments in Public Sector Information made by Governments around Europe in past decade that it is still “hidden” due to under usage by its intended audience, the citizens. How can we unleash this hidden treasure? How can we increase the visibility of existing local, regional, national, European stocks of public sector information (PSI) to boost citizen-centric e-Government? How much will cost Public Administrations (PA) digging out this treasure? The aim of SEED (Speeding Every European Digital) solution is to boost “citizen-centric” e-Government services, to reuse as much as possible the European, national, regional and local stocks of PSI and to leverage saving costs of e-Government and e-Governance deployments through a cloud computing approach and a very cheap network of interactive PSA nodes. SEED is making mash-ups of e-Government contents for raising awareness of citizens about e-Government services available across all Europe. It is about transforming PSI in interactive advertisement messages. The paper describes the SEED platform and the technological platform that powers it, highlights the main concepts and presents the initial findings after more than one year of field deployment of seven pilots within six EU countries.

Context
OpenCoesione is the first portal about the fulfilment of investments and projects planned by the Italian central government and by the Italian Regions with the 2007-2013 European Cohesion funds. Together with Monithon, it is a “transparency tool” whose aim is to foster participation of the citizens and efficiency of the public sector bodies in order to improve the implementation of development policies. By now it is one of the best Open Data portal in Italy qualitywise.

Objective
Our goal is to show the utility of these portals, how this open information are helping the civil society and how the quality of the data is managed publishing these data.

Method
We focus on how these data are being used in the real world showing some concrete examples keeping an eye on the quality of the data

Results
We present some evidences on how open data can positively affect the public sector bodies and the spending of funds.

Conclusions
In Italy there is a serious problem of underspending of the Cohesion funds and in time of spending reviews and low GDPs it is even a worse problem. OpenCoesione and Monithon can help solving some of these inefficiencies.

The article presents one case of collecting and distribution of open ecological data and internal structure of business processes responsible for their gathering and maintenance. This is elaborated by using BPMN paradigm which presents open data lifecycle from organizational point of view. By such approach potential users and stakeholders gain insight into procedures that gather and deliver open data which gives them opportunity to verify data consistency and influence policy making. The case study presents environmental pollution register and its business process structure.

In this paper, we describe Open Data Albania (ODA) project and concrete cases of open data utilization. ODA aims at providing open datasets of valuable information which can be structured, analyzed and presented in different forms leading to intuitive knowledge representations. Besides the datasets, the project has also produced analytical studies based on the data and insightful visualizations to make the knowledge understandable and easy to utilize by different communities.

The platform where the data is published online is the most prominent one for open data in Albania and very popular between the journalists, who are continuously using data from ODA to provide the public with information on different social-economic aspects. In many cases, the project has been used in direct advocacy initiatives. In this paper, we described a set of cases where the data is utilized by different groups, such as government institutions, NGOs, media, and academia.

This case study compares the approaches to publication of Open Government Data in two Czech public sector bodies: the Czech Telecommunication Office (CTO) and the Czech Trade Inspection Authority (CTIA). The top-down approach applied by the CTO is compared to the bottom-up approach applied by the CTIA. Achieved results of these two public sector bodies are described. The case study is concluded with the lessons learned.

The Canary Islands receive 10 million tourists every year. Tourism represents a key sector for economic development in the Canaries. This work presents the benefits of open data usages in the tourism sector both in municipalities and in the island government. These public institutions have valuable information that should be shared with other institutions: 600 hotels and apartments, 10,000 bars and restaurants, and more than 15,000 retail businesses. This work presents an open data project to validate and to publish such data across multiple administrations. The main benefits for the public sector are the improvement of the data quality and the interoperability between different administrations.

This case study highlights how the Flemish government are encouraging Flemish administrations and local authorities to open up data and build applications through financing or co-financing worthwhile innovative open data initiatives. Twenty-four proposals were received of which ten were selected. The case studies and presentation describes the approach and expected results of this initiative.

The provision of public information contributes to the enrichment and enhancement of the data produced by the government as part of its activities, and the transformation of heterogeneous data into information and knowledge. This process of opening changes the operational mode of public administrations, leveraging the data management, encouraging savings and especially in promoting the development of services in subsidiary and collaborative form between public and private entities. The demand for new services also promotes renewed entrepreneurship centered on responding to new social and territorial needs through new technologies. In this sense we speak of Open Data as an enabling infrastructure for the development of innovation and as an instrument to the development and diffusion of Innovation and Communications Technology (ICT) in the public system as well as creating space for innovation for businesses, particularly SMEs, based on the exploitation of information assets of the territory. The Open Data Trentino Project has initiated and fosters the process of opening of public information and develops as a natural consequence of this process of openness, the creation of innovative services for and with the citizens. In this paper we present how our project acts on long-chain, from raw data till reusable meaningful and scalable knowledge base that leads to the production of data reuse through the implementation of services that will enhance and transform the data into information capable of responding to specific questions efficiency and innovation.

Statistical data is often used as the foundations for policy prediction, planning and adjustments, and therefore has a significant impact on the society (from citizens to businesses to governments). Linked Data paradigm has opened new possibil-ities and perspectives for the process of collecting and monitoring socio-economic indicators. The paper introduces the LOD2 Statistical Workbench, an integrated set of professional tools for accessing, manipulating, exploring and publishing statistical data. The data representation and processing is based on the W3C standard vocabularies (RDF Data Cube as a main model) and open source components delivered by the LOD2 consortium. Using an illustrative case study of the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia, the paper gives an overview of possible scenarios and shows examples of its use. The first results indicate that wider adoption of the Linked Data tools in practice can be foreseen.

The number of open government initiatives and directives around the globe with focused interest on publishing large amounts of data on the Web as “open” is increasing rapidly in the recent years. Opening up data aims for citizens, scientists and organizations to easily access, discover and exploit the data and consequently to benefit out of them. As a result, there has been an emerging need of integrating and representing those data in transparent and reusable ways, with high degree of interoperability which will further facilitate the discovery of new connections and insights by linking data coming from disperse sources. Statistical data published either by government bodies or by national statistical authorities are used for policy and decision making purposes, as they present important socioeconomic indicators. In this paper, we present a generic methodology describing the basic steps and overall model to publish statistical data coming from tabular data sources or relational databases as Linked Open Data.

Currently there exists no simple way for researchers, journalists and interested people to explore and compare statistical data across different data stores on the Web. Consequently, uncovering valuable insights about our societies, making predictions, or building smarter systems remains to be challenging. In order to improve on the current state of matters, both technological and political, we report on our design and implementation of a user-centric application at stats.270a.info based on decentralized statistical linked dataspaces at 270a.info. In a nutshell, we have 1) re-deployed original data from (Government, IGO, NGO) statistical agencies like World Bank, Transparency International, OECD, BFS, FAO, ECB, IMF, UIS, and FRB as Linked Data, 2) interlinked common statistical concepts across these agencies, 3) built a statistical analyses service which utilizes federated queries to gather data and compute statistical analysis. Thus, we aim to demonstrate the feasibility and potentials of this effort by making the statistical analyses available as new information for future discovery and research. Essentially our goal is to encourage national and international statistical agencies to publish semantically rich data for better public collaboration, as well as to create digital cultural artifacts.

The Hungarian Scientific Bibliography (Magyar Tudományos Művek Tára, MTMT) is a comprehensive national bibliographic database of scientific publications and citations. Since 1999 MTMT collects data from researchers and institutions, containing almost 5 million records presently. The database is used by all major centres of research: universities and the research institute network of the Academy. Planned legislation states that registering all publications from research using taxpayer money will be required in the future. Data in MTMT can be used for supporting evidence-based management in science, fund allocating for institutions, projects and individuals. This database promotes transparency with displaying scientific output, in the form of statistics, but also enabling access to the articles themselves - the latter residing either at the publisher or at institutional repositories. MTMT supplies data to the electronic proposal management system of the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund and other information systems run by universities or the government.