The European Union aims to boost the Data Economy by promoting the free flow of data between member states and between strategic sectors, for the benefit of businesses, researchers, public administrations and citizens. Undoubtedly, data is a critical factor in the industrial and technological revolution we are experiencing, and therefore one of the EU's digital priorities is to capitalise on its latent value, relying on a single market where data can be shared under conditions of security and, above all, sovereignty, as this is the only way to guarantee indisputable European values and rights.

Thus, the European Data Strategy seeks to enhance the exchange of data on a large scale, under distributed and federated environments, while ensuring cybersecurity and transparency. To achieve scale, and to unlock the full potential of data in the digital economy, a key element is building trust. This, as a basic element that conditions the liquidity of the ecosystem, must be developed coherently across different areas and among different actors (data providers, users, intermediaries, service platforms, developers, etc.). Therefore, their articulation affects different perspectives, including business and functional, legal and regulatory, operational, and even technological. Therefore, success in these highly complex projects depends on developing strategies that seek to minimise barriers to entry for participants, and maximise the efficiency and sustainability of the services offered. This in turn translates into the development of data infrastructures and governance models that are easily scalable, and that provide the basis for effective data exchange to generate value for all stakeholders.

A methodology to boost data spaces

Spain has taken on the task of putting this European strategy into practice, and has been working for years to create an environment conducive to facilitating the deployment and establishment of a Sovereign Data Economy, supported, among other instruments, by the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. In this sense, and from its coordinating and enabling role, the Data Office has made efforts to design a general conceptual methodology , agnostic to a specific sector. It shapes the creation of data ecosystems around practical projects that bring value to the members of the ecosystem.

Therefore, the methodology consists of several elements, one of them being experimentation. This is because, by their flexible nature, data can be processed, modelled and thus interpreted from different perspectives. For this reason, experimentation is key to properly calibrate those processes and treatments needed to reach the market with pilots or business cases already close to the industries, so that they are closer to generating a positive impact. In this sense, it is necessary to demonstrate tangible value and underpin its sustainability, which implies, as a minimum, having:

• Frameworks for effective data governance
• Actions to improve the availability and quality of data, also seeking to increase their interoperability by design
• Tools and platforms for data exchange and exploitation.

Furthermore, given that each sector has its own specificity in terms of data types and semantics, business models, and participants' needs, the creation of communities of experts, representing the voice of the market, is another key element in generating useful projects. Based on this active listening, which leads to an understanding of the dynamics of data in each sector, it is possible to characterise the market and governance conditions necessary for the deployment of data spaces in strategic sectors such as tourism, mobility, agri-food, commerce, health and industry.

In this process of community building, data co-operatives play a fundamental role, as well as the more general figure of the data broker, which serves to raise awareness of the existing opportunity and favour the effective creation and consolidation of these new business models.

All these elements are different pieces of a puzzle with which to explore new business development opportunities, as well as to design tangible projects to demonstrate the differential value that data sharing will bring to the reality of industries. Thus, from an operational perspective, the last element of the methodology is the development of concrete use cases. These will also allow the iterative deployment of a catalogue of reusable experience and data resources in each sector to facilitate the construction of new projects. This catalogue thus becomes the centrepiece of a common sectoral and federated platform, whose distributed architecture also facilitates cross-sectoral interconnection.

On the shoulders of giants

It should be noted that Spain is not starting from scratch, as it already has a powerful ecosystem of innovation and experimentation in data, offering advanced services. We therefore believe it would be interesting to make progress in the harmonisation or complementarity of their objectives, as well as in the dissemination of their capacities in order to gain capillarity. Furthermore, the proposed methodology reinforces the alignment with European projects in the same field, which will serve to connect learning and progress from the national level to those made at EU level, as well as to put into practice the design tasks of the "cyanotypes" promulgated by the European Commission through the Data Spaces Support Centre.

Finally,the promotion of experimental or pilot projects also enables the development of standards for innovative data technologies, which is closely related to the Gaia-X project. Thus, the Gaia-X Hub Spain has an interoperability node, which serves to certify compliance with the rules prescribed by each sector, and thus to generate the aforementioned digital trust based on their specific needs.

At the Data Office, we believe that the interconnection and future scalability of data projects are at the heart of the effort to implement the European Data Strategy, and are crucial to achieve a dynamic and rich Data Economy, but at the same time a guarantor of European values and where traceability and transparency help to collectivise the value of data, catalysing a stronger and more cohesive economy.

The Open Data Maturity Study 2022 provides a snapshot of the level of development of policies promoting open data in countries, as well as an assessment of the expected impact of these policies. Among its findings, it highlights that measuring the impact of open data is a priority, but also a major challenge across Europe. 

In this edition, there has been a 7% decrease in the average maturity level in the impact dimension for EU27 countries, which coincides with the restructuring of the impact dimension indicators. However, it is not so much a decrease in the level of maturity, but a more accurate picture of the difficulty in assessing the resulting impact of reuse of open data difficulty in assessing the impact resulting from the re-use of open data. 

Therefore, in order to better understand how to make progress on the challenge of measuring the impact of open data, we have looked at existing best practices for measuring the impact of open data in Europe. To achieve this objective, we have worked with the data provided by the countries in their responses to the survey questionnaire and in particular with those of the eleven countries that have scored more than 500 points in the Impact dimension, regardless of their overall score and their position in the ranking: France, Ireland, Cyprus, Estonia and the Czech Republic scoring the maximum 600 points; and Poland, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Sweden scoring above 510 points. 

In the report we provide a country profile for each of the ten countries, analysing in general terms the country's performance in all dimensions of the study and in detail the different components of the impact dimension, summarising the practices that have led to its high score based on the analysis of the responses to the questionnaire. 

Through this tabbed structure the document allows for a direct comparison between country indicators and provides a detailed overview of best practices and challenges in the use of open data in terms of measuring impact through the following indicators: 

• "Strategic awareness": It quantifies the awareness and preparedness of countries to understand the level of reuse and impact of open data within their territory. 

• "Measuring reuse": It focuses on how countries measure open data re-use and what methods they use. 

•  "Impact created": It collects data on the impact created within four impact areas: government impact (formerly policy impact), social impact, environmental impact and economic impact. 

Finally, the report provides a comparative analysis of these countries and draws out a series of recommendations and good practices that aim to provide ideas on how to improve the impact of open data on each of the three indicators measured in the study. 

If you want to know more about the content of this report, you can watch the interview with its author interview with its author.

Below, you can download the full report, the executive summary and a presentation-summary.

Content prepared by Jose Luis Marín, Senior Consultant in Data, Strategy, Innovation & Digitalization.

The contents and views expressed in this publication are the sole responsibility of the author.

The European Commission's 'European Data Strategy' states that the creation of a single market for shared data is key. In this strategy, the Commission has set as one of its main objectives the promotion of a data economy in line with European values of self-determination in data sharing (sovereignty), confidentiality, transparency, security and fair competition.

Common data spaces at European level are a fundamental resource in the data strategy because they act as enablers for driving the data economy. Indeed, pooling European data in key sectors, fostering data circulation and creating collective and interoperable data spaces are actions that contribute to the benefit of society.

Although data sharing environments have existed for a long time, the creation of data spaces that guarantee EU values and principles is an issue. Developing enabling legislative initiatives is not only a technological challenge, but also one of coordination among stakeholders, governance, adoption of standards and interoperability.

To address a challenge of this magnitude, the Commission plans to invest close to €8 billion by 2027 in the deployment of Europe's digital transformation. Part of the project includes the promotion of infrastructures, tools, architectures and data sharing mechanisms. For this strategy to succeed, a data space paradigm that is embedded in the industry needs to be developed, based on the fulfilment of European values. This data space paradigm will act as a de facto technology standard and will advance social awareness of the possibilities of data, which will enable the economic return on the investments required to create it.

In order to make the data space paradigm a reality, from the convergence of current initiatives, the European Commission has committed to the development of the Simpl project.

What exactly is Simpl?

Simpl is a €150 million project funded by the European Commission's Digital Europe programme with a three-year implementation period. Its objective is to provide society with middleware for building data ecosystems and cloud infrastructure services that support the European values of data sovereignty, privacy and fair markets.

The Simpl project consists of the delivery of 3 products:

• Simpl-Open: Middleware itself. This is a software solution to create ecosystems of data services (data and application sharing) and cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, etc). This software must include agents enabling connection to the data space, operational services and brokerage services (catalogue, vocabulary, activity log, etc.). The result should be delivered under an open source licence and an attempt will be made to build an open source community to ensure its evolution.
• Simpl-Labs: Infrastructure for creating test bed environments so that interested users can test the latest version of the software in self-service mode. This environment is primarily intended for data space developers who want to do the appropriate technical testing prior to a deployment.
• Simpl-Live: Deployments of Simpl-open in production environments that will correspond to sectorial spaces contemplated in the Digital Europe programme. In particular, the deployment of data spaces managed by the European Commission itself (Health, Procurement, Language) is envisaged.

The project is practically oriented and aims to deliver results as soon as possible. It is therefore intended that, in addition to supplying the software, the contractor will provide a laboratory service for user testing. The company developing Simpl will also have to adapt the software for the deployment of common European data spaces foreseen in the Digital Europe programme.

The Gaia-X partnership is considered to be the closest in its objectives to the Simpl project, so the outcome of the project should strive for the reuse of the components made available by Gaia-X. 

For its part, the Data Space Support Center, which involves the main European initiatives for the creation of technological frameworks and standards for the construction of data spaces, will have to define the middleware requirements by means of specifications, architectural models and the selection of standards.

Simpl's preparatory work was completed in May 2022, setting out the scope and technical requirements of the project which have been the subject of detail in the currently open contractual process. The tender was launched on 24 February 2023. All information is available on TED eTendering, including how to ask questions about the tendering process. The deadline for applications is 24 April 2023 at 17:00 (Brussels time).

Simpl expects to have a minimum viable platform published in early 2024. In parallel, and as soon as possible, the open test environment (Simpl-Labs) will be made available for interested parties to experiment. This will be followed by the progressive integration of different use cases, helping to tailor Simpl to specific needs, with priority being given to cases otherwise funded under the Europe DIGITAL work programme.

In conclusion, Simpl is the European Commission's commitment to the deployment and interoperability of the different sectoral data space initiatives, ensuring alignment with the specifications and requirements emanating from the Data Space Support Center and, therefore, with the convergence process of the different European initiatives for the construction of data spaces (Gaia-X, IDSA, Fiware, BDVA).

Gaia-X represents an innovative paradigm for linking data more closely to the technological infrastructure underneath, so as to ensure the transparency, origin and functioning of these resources. This model allows us to deploy a sovereign and transparent data economy, which respects European fundamental rights, and which in Spain will take shape around the sectoral data spaces (C12.I1 and C14.I2 of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan). These data spaces will be aligned with the European regulatory framework, as well as with governance and instruments designed to ensure interoperability, and on which to articulate the sought-after single data market.

In this sense, Gaia-X interoperability nodes, or Gaia-X Digital Clearing House (GXDCH), aim to offer automatic validation services of interoperability rules to developers and participants of data spaces. The creation of such nodes was announced at the Gaia-X Summit 2022 in Paris last November. The Gaia-X architecture, promoted by the Gaia-X European Association for Data & Cloud AISBL, has established itself as a promising technological alternative for the creation of open and transparent ecosystems of data sets and services.

These ecosystems, federated by nature, will serve to develop the data economy at scale. But in order to do so, a set of minimum rules must be complied with to ensure interoperability between participants. Compliance with these rules is precisely the function of the GXDCH, serving as an "anchor" to deploy certified market services. Therefore, the creation of such a node in Spain is a crucial element for the deployment of federated data spaces at national level, which will stimulate development and innovation around data in an environment of respect for data sovereignty, privacy, transparency and fair competition.

The GXDCH is defined as a node where operational services of an ecosystem compliant with the Gaia-X interoperability rules are provided. Operational services" should be understood as services that are necessary for the operation of a data space, but are not in themselves data sharing services, data exploitation applications or cloud infrastructures. Gaia-X defines six operational services, of which at least two must be part of the mandatory nodes hosting the GXDCHs:

Mandatory services

• Gaia-X Registry: Defined as an immutable, non-repudiable, distributed database with code execution capabilities. Typically it would be a blockchain infrastructure supporting a decentralised identity service ('Self Sovereign Identity') in which, among others, the list of Trust Anchors or other data necessary for the operation of identity management in Gaia-X is stored.
• Gaia-X Compliance Service or Gaia-X Compliance Service: Belongs to the so-called Gaia-X Federation Services and its function is to verify compliance with the minimum interoperability rules defined by the Gaia-X Association (e.g. the Trust Framework).

Optional services

• Self-Descriptions (SDs) or Wizard Edition Service: SDs are verifiable credentials according to the standard defined by the W3C by means of which both the participants of a Gaia-X ecosystem and the products made available by the providers describe themselves. The aforementioned compliance service consists of validating that the SDs comply with the interoperability standards. The Wizard is a convenience service for the creation of Self-Descriptions according to pre-defined schemas.
• Catalogue: Storage service of the service offer available in the ecosystem for consultation.
• e-Wallet: For the management of verifiable credentials (SDs) by participants in a system based on distributed identities.
• Notary Service: Service for issuing verifiable credentials signed by accreditation authorities (Trust Anchors).

What is the Gaia-X Compliance Service (i.e. Compliance Service)?

The Gaia-X Compliance Service belongs to the so-called Gaia-X Federation Services and its function is to verify compliance with the minimum interoperability rules defined by the Gaia-X Association. Gaia-X calls these minimum interoperability rules (Trust Framework). It should be noted that the establishment of the Trust Framework is one of the differentiating contributions of the Gaia-X technology framework compared to other solutions on the market. But the objective is not just to establish interoperability standards, but to create a service that is operable and, as far as possible, automated, that validates compliance with the Trust Framework. This service is the Gaia-X Compliance Service.

The key element of these rules are the so-called "Self-Descriptions" (SDs). SDs are verifiable credentials according to the standard defined by the W3C by which both the participants of a data space and the products made available by the providers describe themselves. The Gaia-X Compliance service validates compliance with the Trust Framework by checking the SDs from the following points of view:

• Format and syntax of the SDs
• Validation of the SDs schemas (vocabulary and ontology)
• Validation of the cryptography of the signatures of the issuers of the SDs
• Attribute consistency
• Attribute value veracity.

Once the Self-Descriptions have been validated, the compliance service operator issues a verifiable credential that attests to compliance with interoperability standards, providing confidence to ecosystem participants. Gaia-X AISBL provides the necessary code to implement the Compliance Service and authorises the provision of the service to trusted entities, but does not directly operate the service and therefore requires the existence of partners to carry out this task.

Public administration is working to ensure access to open data, in order to empowering citizens in their right to information. Aligned with this objective, the European open data portal (data.europa.eu) references a large volume of data on a variety of topics.

However, although the data belong to different information domains or are in different formats, it is complex to exploit them together to maximise their value. One way to achieve this is through the use of RDF (Resource Description Framework), a data model that enables semantic interoperability of data on the web, standardised by the W3C, and highlighted in the FAIR principles. RDF occupies one of the top levels of the five-star schema for open data publishing, proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web.

In RDF, data and metadata are automatically interconnected, generating a network of Linked Open Data (LOD) by providing the necessary semantic context through explicit relationships between data from different sources to facilitate their interconnection. This model maximises the exploitation potential of linked data.

It is a data sharing paradigm that is particularly relevant within the EU data space initiative explained in this post.

RDF offers great advantages to the community. However, in order to maximise the exploitation of linked open data it is necessary to know the SPARQL query language, a technical requirement that can hinder public access to the data.

An example of the use of RDF is the open data catalogues available on portals such as datos.gob.es or data.europa.eu that are developed following the DCAT standard, which is an RDF data model to facilitate their interconnection. These portals have interfaces to configure queries in SPARQL language and retrieve the metadata of the available datasets.

A new app to make interlinked data accessible: Vinalod.

Faced with this situation and with the aim of facilitating access to linked data, Teresa Barrueco, a data scientist and visualisation specialist who participated in the 2018 EU Datathon, the EU competition to promote the design of digital solutions and services related to open data, developed an application together with the European Publications Office.

The result is a tool for exploring LOD without having to be familiar with SPARQL syntax, called Vinalod: Visualisation and navigation of linked open data. The application, as its name suggests, allows you to navigate and visualise data structures in knowledge graphs that represent data objects linked to each other through the use of vocabularies that represent the existing relationships between them. Thus, through a visual and intuitive interaction, the user can access different data sources:

• EU Vocabularies. EU reference data containing, among others, information from Digital Europa Thesaurus, NUTS classification (hierarchical system to divide the economic territory of the EU) and controlled vocabularies from the Named Authority Lists.
• Who's Who in the EU. Official EU directory to identify the institutions that make up the structure of the European administration.
• EU Data. Sets and visualisations of data published on the EU open data portal that can be browsed according to origin and subject.
• EU publications. Reports published by the European Union classified according to their subject matter.
• EU legislation. EU Treaties and their classification.

The good news is that the BETA version of Vinalod is now available for use, an advance that allows for temporary filtering of datasets by country or language.

To test the tool, we tried searching for data catalogues published in Spanish, which have been modified in the last three months. The response of the tool is as follows:

And it can be interpreted as follows:

Therefore, the data.europa.eu portal hosts ("has catalog") several catalogues that meet the defined criteria: they are in Spanish language and have been published in the last three months. The user can drill down into each node ("to") and find out which datasets are published in each portal.

In the example above, we have explored the 'EU data' section. However, we could do a similar exercise with any of the other sections. These are: EU Vocabularies; Who's Who in the EU; EU Publications and EU Legislation.

All of these sections are interrelated, that means, a user can start by browsing the 'EU Facts', as in the example above, and end up in 'Who's Who in the EU' with the directory of European public officials.

As can be deduced from the above tests, browsing Vinalod is a practical exercise in itself that we encourage all users interested in the management, exploitation and reuse of open data to try out.

To this end, in this link we link the BETA version of the tool that contributes to making open data more accessible without the need to know SPARQL, which means that anyone with minimal technical knowledge can work with the linked open data.

This is a valuable contribution to the community of developers and reusers of open data because it is a resource that can be accessed by any user profile, regardless of their technical background. In short, Vinalod is a tool that empowers citizens, respects their right to information and contributes to the further opening of open data.

Like every other year, the EU Open Data Portal has just published the results of its report Open Data Maturity 2022. It is a study that assesses the maturity of European countries in the field of open data and it provides an overview of the good practices followed in Europe, which can be transferred to other national and local contexts. Both the member states of the European Union (EU-27) and other countries in the region have participated in the study.

Spain has achieved a score of 92%, thirteen points above the EU27 average. With this score, it is in the leading group. France secured first place, followed by Ukraine and Poland.

Spain is above the European average for the 4 indicators analysed

The report measures maturity in relation to four aspects of open data:

• Policy, focused on the open data strategies of the different countries.
• Impact, which analyses the activities carried out to monitor and measure the reuse of open data and their impact.
• Portal, focused on evaluating the functions and characteristics of the national platform that allows users to access open data and promote interaction within the community.
• Quality, which examines mechanisms to ensure the quality of (meta)data.

In all four categories, Spain is ahead of the EU27 average, particularly standing out in the policy section. Some of the aspects that the report highlights in Spain are the open mechanisms for communicating and interacting from datos.gob.es with the open data community, the use of dashboards to monitor the use of datasets or some specific examples of use cases such as Climate change scenario viewer or Gijón in a click.

With this score, Spain falls within the so-called trendsetter group. The countries that belong to this group stand out for their strong commitment to open data, borne out by an advanced strategy, more mature platforms and an active methodology for measuring the impact of open data.

3 key trends in Europe

This year's analysis highlights three trends at European level:

1. EU Member States are preparing for the implementation of the high-value datasets regulation. Directive 2019/1024 highlighted, amongst other issues, a specific regime for the so-called high-value data, in other words, those whose reuse is associated with considerable benefits for society, the environment and the economy. Although their implementing regulation has not yet been made public, 96% of EU Member States are already working on the identification of high-value data, especially in the categories of statistical, geospatial, Earth observation, environmental and meteorological data. In addition, 85% are already prepared to monitor and measure their level of reuse and 63% to ensure their interoperability with available data sets from other countries.  Spain is no exception and it is one of the most advanced countries in this regard.
2. Measuring the impact of open data is a priority for EU Member States, but it is a major challenge too. Countries are still interested in understanding and capturing open data reuse and value creation, but compiling data on the impact created remains challenging, especially in the economic area.
3. In a post-pandemic world, European countries face new and old common challenges. The impact of the war in Ukraine has affected all countries, both socially and economically. Open data have proven to serve as a mechanism to help refugees or improve energy management. Other common challenges highlighted in the report are the lack of resources and qualified personnel or the difficulty in coordinating between the different levels of the administration, inter alia.

Recommendations to keep moving ahead in the field of open data

The report ends with a series of recommendations by groups of countries. In the case of open data trendsetters, the group to which Spain belongs, the report recommends focusing on maintaining the current ecosystem, experimenting and sharing knowledge.

To be precise, the focus should be placed on improving and consolidating open data ecosystems through the development of thematic communities of providers and reusers. It is also recommended to collaborate with data.europa.eu, other national data teams, universities and research institutions to develop an experimental impact evaluation framework.

High-value data sets stand out as one of the areas to prioritise, based on that which was previously indicated in Directive 2019/1024. In addition to preparing for the Data Governance Regulation, evaluating the existing options to expand the portals and assuming the role of public registry for those organisations linked to the altruistic transfer of data.

You can read the full report via this link.

Este informe, que publica el Portal de Datos Europeo, analiza el potencial de reutilización de los datos en tiempo real. Los datos en tiempo real ofrecen información con alta frecuencia de actualización sobre el entorno que nos rodea (por ejemplo, información sobre el tráfico, datos meteorológicos, mediciones de la contaminación ambiental, información sobre riesgos naturales, etc.).

El documento resume los resultados y conclusiones de un seminario web organizado por el equipo del Portal de Datos Europeo celebrado el pasado 5 de abril de 2022, donde se explicaron diferentes formas de compartir datos en tiempo real desde plataformas de datos abiertos.

En primer lugar, el informe hace un repaso sobre el fundamento de los datos en tiempo real e incluye ejemplos que justifican el valor que aporta este tipo de datos para, a continuación, describir dos enfoques tecnológicos sobre cómo compartir datos en tiempo real del ámbito de IoT y el transporte. Incluye, además, un bloque que resume las principales conclusiones de las preguntas y comentarios de los participantes que giran, principalmente, en torno a difentes necesidades de fuentes de datos y funcionalidades requeridas para su reutilización.

Para terminar, basándose en el feedback y la discusión generada, se proporciona un conjunto de recomendaciones y acciones a corto y medio plazo sobre cómo mejorar la capacidad para localizar fuentes de datos en tiempo real a través del Portal de Datos Europeo.

Este informe se encuentra disponible en el siguiente enlace: "Datos en tiempo real: Enfoques para integrar fuentes de datos en tiempo real en data.europa.eu"

Measuring the impact of open data is one of the challenges facing open data initiatives. Ther are a variety of methods, most of which combine quantitative and qualitative analysis in order to understand the value of specific datasets.

In this context, data.europa.eu, the European Open Data Portal, has launched a Use Case Observatory. This is a research project on the economic, governmental, social and environmental impact of open data.

What is the Use Case Observatory?

For three years, from 2022 to 2025, the European Data Portal will monitor 30 cases of re-use of open data. The aim is to:

1. Assess how the impact of open data is created.
2. Share the challenges and achievements of the analysed re-use cases
3. Contribute to the debate on the methodology to be used to measure such impact.

The analysed use cases refer to four areas of impact:

• Economic impact: includes reuse cases related to business creation and (re)training of workers, among others. For example, solutions that help identify public tenders or apply for jobs are included.
• Governmental impact: This refers to reuse cases that drive e-government, transparency and accountability.
• Social impact: includes cases of re-use in the fields of healthcare, welfare and tackling inequality.
• Environmental impact: This is limited to cases of re-use that promote sustainability and energy reduction, including solutions related to air quality control or forest preservation.

To select the use cases, an inventory was made based on three sources: the examples collected in the maturity studies carried out each year by the European portal, the solutions participating in the EU Datathon and the examples of reuse available in the repository of use cases on data.europa.eu. Only projects developed in Europe were taken into account, trying to maintain a balance between the different countries. In addition, projects that had won an award or were aligned with the European Commission's priorities for 2019 to 2024 were highlighted. To finalise the selection process, data.europa.eu conducted interviews with representatives of the use cases that met the requirements and were interested in participating in the project.

Three Spanish projects among the use cases analysed

The selected use cases are shown in the following image:

Among them, there are three Spaniards:

• In the Social Impact category is UniversiDATA-Lab, a public portal for the advanced and automatic analysis of datasets published by universities. This project, which won the first prize in the III Desafío Aporta, was conceived by the team that created UniversiData, a collaborative initiative oriented and driven by public universities with the aim of promoting open data in the higher education sector in Spain in a harmonised way. You can learn more about these projects in this interview.
• In the same category we also find Tangible data, a project focused on the creation of sculptures based on data, to bring them closer to non-technical people. Among other data sources, it uses datasets from NASA or Our World in Data.
• In the environment category is Planttes. This is a citizen science project designed to report on the presence of allergenic plants in our environment and the level of allergy risk depending on their condition. This project is promoted by the Aerobiological Information Point (PIA) of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and the Department of Animal Biology, Plant Biology and Ecology (BABVE), in collaboration with the Computer Vision Centre (CVC) and the Library Living Lab, all of them at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB).

First report now available

As a result of the analysis carried out, three reports will be developed. The first report, which has just been published, presents the methodology and the 30 selected cases of re-use. It includes information on the services they offer, the (open) data they use and their impact at the time of writing. The report ends with a summary of the general conclusions and lessons learned from this first part of the research project, giving an overview of the next steps of the observatory.

The second and third reports, to be released in 2024 and 2025, will assess the progress of the same use cases and expand on the findings of this first volume. The reports will focus on identifying achievements and challenges over a three-year period, allowing concrete ideas to be extrapolated to improve methodologies for assessing the impact of open data.

The project was presented in a webinar on 7 October, a recording of which is available, together with the presentation used. Representatives from 4 of the use cases were invited to participate in the webinar: Openpolis, Integreat, ANP, and OpenFoodFacts.

On 20 October, the EU's open data competition came to an end after several months of competition. The final of this sixth edition of the EU Datathon was held in Brussels in the framework of the European Year of Youth and was streamed worldwide.

It is a competition that gives open data enthusiasts and application developers from around the world the opportunity to demonstrate the potential of open data, while their innovative ideas gain international visibility and compete for a portion of the total prize money of €200,000.

The finalist teams were pre-selected from a total of 156 initial submissions. They came from 38 different countries, the largest participation in the history of the competition, to compete in four different categories related to the challenges facing Europe today.

Before the final, the selected participants had the opportunity to present in video format each of the proposals they have been developing based on the open data from the European catalogues.

Here is a breakdown of the winning teams in each challenge, the content of the proposal and the amount of the prize.

Winners of the “European Green Deal” Challenge

The European Green Deal is the blueprint for a modern, sustainable and competitive European economy. Participants who took up the challenge had to develop applications or services aimed at creating a green Europe, capable of driving resource efficiency.

1st prize: CROZ RenEUwable (Croatia)

The application developed by this Croatian team, "renEUwable", combines the analysis of environmental, social and economic data to provide specific and personal recommendations on sustainable energy use.

• Prize: €25,000

2nd prize: MyBioEUBuddy (France, Montenegro)

This project was created to help farm workers and local governments find regions that grow organic produce and can serve as an example to build a more sustainable agricultural network.

• Prize: €15,000

3rd prize: Green Land Dashboard for Cities (Italy)

The bronze in this category went to an Italian project that aims to analyse and visualise the evolution of green spaces in order to help cities, regional governments and non-governmental organisations to make them more liveable and sustainable.

• Prize: €7,000

"Winners of the “Transparency in Public Procurement” Challenge

Transparency in public procurement helps to track how money is spent, combat fraud and analyse economic and market trends. Participants who chose this challenge had to explore the information available to develop an application to improve transparency.

1st prize: Free Software Foundation Europe e.V (Germany)

This team of developers aims to make the links between the private sector, public administrations, users and tenders accessible.

• Prize: €25,000

2nd prize: The AI-Team (Germany)

This is a project that proposes to visualise data from TED, the European public procurement journal, in a graphical database and combine them with ownership information and a list of sanctioned entities. This will allow public officials and competitors to trace the amounts and values of contracts awarded back to the owners of the companies.

• Prize: €15,000

3rd prize: EMMA (France)

This fraud prevention and early detection tool allows public institutions, journalists and civil society to automatically monitor how the relationship between companies and administration is established at the beginning of a public procurement process.

• Prize: €7,000

Winners of the “Public Procurement Opportunities for Young People” Challenge

Public procurement is often perceived as a complex field, where only specialists feel comfortable finding the information they need. Thus, the developers who participated in this challenge had to design, for example, apps aimed at helping young people find the information they need to apply for public procurement positions.

1st prize: Hermix (Belgium, Romania)

It is a tool that develops a strategic marketing methodology aimed at the B2G (business to government) sector so that it is possible to automate the creation and monitoring of strategies for this sector.

• Prize: €25,000

2nd prize: YouthPOP (France)

YouthPOP is a tool designed to democratise employment and public procurement opportunities to bring them closer to young workers and entrepreneurs. It does this by combining historical data with machine learning technology.

• Prize: €15,000

3rd prize: HasPopEU (Romania)

This proposal takes advantage of open EU public procurement data and machine learning techniques to improve the communication of the skills required to access this type of job vacancies. The application focuses on young people, immigrants and SMEs.

• Prize: €7,000

Winners of the “A Europe Fit for the Digital Age” Challenge

The EU aims for a digital transformation that works for people and businesses. Therefore, participants in this challenge developed applications and services aimed at improving data skills, connectivity or data dissemination, always based on the European Data Strategy.

1st prize:: Lobium/Gavagai (Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom)

This application, developed using natural language processing techniques, was created with the aim of facilitating the work of investigative journalists, promoting transparency and rapid access to certain information.

• Prize: €25,000

2nd prize: 100 Europeans (France)

It is an interactive app that uses open data to raise awareness of the great challenges of our time. In this way, and aware of how difficult it is to communicate the impact that these challenges have on society, '100 Europeans' changes the way of conveying the message and personalises the effects of climate change, pollution or overweight in a total of one hundred people. The aim of this project is to make society more aware of these challenges by telling them through the stories of people close to them.

• Prize: €15,000

3rd prize: UNIOR NLP (Italy)

Leveraging European natural language processing techniques and data collection, the Computational Linguistics and Automatic Natural Language Processing research group at the University of Naples L'Orientale has developed a personal assistant called Maggie that guides users to explore cultural content across Europe, answering their questions and offering personalised suggestions.

• Prize: €7,000

Finally, the Audience Award of this 2022 edition also went to CROZ RenEUwable, the same team that won the first prize in the challenge dedicated to fostering commitment to the European Green Pact.

As in previous editions, the EU Datathon is a competition organised by the Publications Office of the European Union in collaboration with the European Data Strategy. Thus, the recently closed 2022 edition has managed to activate the support of some twenty partners representing open data stakeholders inside and outside the European institutions.

On 24 February Europe entered a scenario that not even the data could have predicted: Russia invaded Ukraine, unleashing the first war on European soil so far in the 21st century.

Almost five months later, on 26 September, the United Nations (UN) published its official figures: 4,889 dead and 6,263 wounded. According to the official UN data, month after month, the reality of the Ukrainian victims was as follows:

According to data extracted by the mission that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has been carrying out in Ukraine since Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the total number of civilians displaced as a result of the conflict is more than 7 million people.

However, as in other areas, the data serve not only to develop solutions, but also to gain an in-depth understanding of aspects of reality that would otherwise not be possible. In the case of the war in Ukraine, the collection, monitoring and analysis of data on the territory allows organisations such as the United Nations to draw their own conclusions.

With the aim of making visible how data can be used to achieve peace, we will now analyse the role of data in relation to the following tasks:

Prediction

In this area, data are used to try to anticipate situations and plan an appropriate response to the anticipated risk. Whereas before the outbreak of war, data was used to assess the risk of future conflict, it is now being used to establish control and anticipate escalation.

For example, satellite images provided by applications such as Google Maps have made it possible to monitor the advance of Russian troops. Similarly, visualisers such as Subnational Surge Tracker identify peaks of violence at different administrative levels: states, provinces or municipalities.

Information

It is just as important to know the facts in order to prevent violence as it is to use them to limit misinformation and communicate the facts objectively, truthfully and in line with official figures. To achieve this, fact-checking applications have begun to be used, capable of responding to fake news with official data.

Among them is Newsguard, a verification entity that has developed a tracker that gathers all the websites that share disinformation about the conflict, placing special emphasis on the most popular false narratives circulating on the web. It even catalogues this type of content according to the language in which it is promoted.

Material damage

The data can also be used to locate material damage and track the occurrence of new damage. Over the past months, the Russian offensive has damaged the Ukrainian public infrastructure network, rendering roads, bridges, water and electricity supplies, and even hospitals unusable.

Data on this reality is very useful for organising a response aimed at reconstructing these areas and sending humanitarian assistance to civilians who have been left without services.

In this sense, we highlight the following use cases:

• The United Nations Development Programme''s (UNDP) machine learning algorithm has been developed and improved to identify and classify war-damaged infrastructure.
• In parallel, the HALO Trust uses social media mining capable of capturing information from social media, satellite imagery and even geographic data to help identify areas with ''explosive remnants''. Thanks to this finding, organisations deployed across the Ukrainian terrain can move more safely to organise a coordinated humanitarian response.
• The light information captured by NASA satellites is also being used to build a database to help identify areas of active conflict in Ukraine. As in the previous examples, this data can be used to track and send aid to where it is most needed.

Human rights violations and abuses

Unfortunately, in such conflicts, violations of the human rights of the civilian population are the order of the day. In fact, according to experience on the ground and information gathered by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, such violations have been documented throughout the entire period of war in Ukraine.

In order to understand what is happening to Ukrainian civilians, monitoring and human rights officers collect data, public information and first-person accounts of the war in Ukraine. From this, they develop a mosaic map that facilitates decision-making and the search for just solutions for the population.

Another very interesting work developed with open data is carried out by Conflict Observatory. Thanks to the collaboration of analysts and developers, and the use of geospatial information and artificial intelligence, it has been possible to discover and map war crimes that might otherwise remain invisible.

Migratory movements

Since the outbreak of war last February, more than 7 million Ukrainians have fled the war and thus their own country. As in previous cases, data on migration flows can be used to bolster humanitarian efforts for refugees and IDPs.

Some of the initiatives where open data contributes include the following:

The Displacement Tracking Matrix is a project developed by the International Organization for Migration and aimed at obtaining data on migration flows within Ukraine. Based on the information provided by approximately 2,000 respondents through telephone interviews, a database was created and used to ensure the effective distribution of humanitarian actions according to the needs of each area of the country

Humanitarian response  

Similar to the analysis carried out to monitor migratory movements, the data collected on the conflict also serves to design humanitarian response actions and track the aid provided.

In this line, one of the most active actors in recent months has been the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which created a dataset containing updated projections by gender, age and Ukrainian region. In other words, thanks to this updated mapping of the Ukrainian population, it is much easier to think about what needs each area has in terms of medical supplies, food or even mental health support.

Another initiative that is also providing support in this area is the Ukraine Data Explorer, an open source project developed on the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) platform that provides collaboratively collected information on refugees, victims and funding needs for humanitarian efforts.

Finally, the data collected and subsequently analysed by Premise provides visibility on areas with food and fuel shortages. Monitoring this information is really useful for locating the areas of the country with the least resources for people who have migrated internally and, in turn, for signalling to humanitarian organisations which areas are most in need of assistance.

Innovation and the development of tools capable of collecting data and drawing conclusions from it is undoubtedly a major step towards reducing the impact of armed conflict. Thanks to this type of forecasting and data analysis, it is possible to respond quickly and in a coordinated manner to the needs of civil society in the most affected areas, without neglecting the refugees who are displaced thousands of kilometres from their homes.

We are facing a humanitarian crisis that has generated more than 12.6 million cross-border movements. Specifically, our country has attended to more than 145,600 people since the beginning of the invasion and more than 142,190 applications for temporary protection have been granted, 35% of them to minors. These figures make Spain the fifth Member State with the highest number of favourable temporary protection decisions. Likewise, more than 63,500 displaced persons have been registered in the National Health System and with the start of the academic year, there are 30,919 displaced Ukrainian students enrolled in school, of whom 28,060 are minors..

Content prepared by the datos.gob.es team.