ENGAGE allows for immediate information and control of government data
Over the past few years, information and communication technologies have demonstrated an unprecedented potential for public sector reform. The promise of open government has brought the argument for open data to the forefront.
However, there are still several difficulties that prevent the effective exploration, management and distribution of large volumes of available public sector data to communities that can contribute to the implementation of such reforms, such as researchers, journalists, software developers and even ordinary citizens.
Traditionally, Public Sector Information (PSI) data was published in whatever format was available at the time or most convenient for the government agency responsible for publishing it. Recently, however, the realization that the power of open data comes from the ability to easily and effectively classify, search, interoperate, transform and use it in a wide range of applications has led to the so-called Open Data initiatives. In this context, concepts such as social collaboration and crowd sourcing have the potential to bring unprecedented value to the reuse of public sector data.
The main goal of the ENGAGE platform – which recently entered beta – is to develop and use a pan-European public data infrastructure, which integrates data from multiple governments across Europe and can support collaborations from various user groups such as analysts, journalists and scientific researchers, while at the same time enabling citizens to have direct information and control over public events. The platform is open for registration to the public at the link www.engagedata.eu.
Essentially, the ENGAGE platform is a collaborative public data infrastructure that provides the right tools for searching, acquiring, visualizing, modifying and sharing open data. It differentiates itself from a simple public data repository by providing advanced data discovery and use capabilities through enhanced rich metadata, as well as an easy collaborative environment for analysts, journalists, researchers, and citizens, who can benefit from open public data for professional or personal use.
Public data can be anything from election results, population statistics, unemployment rates, public spending, to statistics on migration, transport, fire incidents and crime. Because these files are usually in formats that cannot be easily edited (e.g. PDF), the ENGAGE platform community collaborates with its tools to make them more structured and with richer metadata (such as csv or excel spreadsheets). Through such collaborations, the Public Sector can move towards more standardized, efficient and semantically enriched structures that will allow the reuse of open data to reach its full potential.
ENGAGE platform features and services
The ENGAGE platform is currently in beta after more than 2 years of intensive research and development under the eponymous co-funded project of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission. The result is a stable platform that offers many features and services to its users. The partners collaborating on the ENGAGE platform have succeeded in implementing and integrating a collection of data-driven services and social network features, including:
– Automatic multilingual data search.
– Automatic translation of data and metadata.
– Data modification/expansion (displayed in a special graph).
– Multi-faceted full-text search of data using “elastic” search.
– Download/upload data from registered users / and metadata definition.
– Visualization with graph and data map.
– Advanced data searches with automatic translation from many European governments (e.g. public authorities) and the European Commission.
– Display of data origin information.
– Formation of user groups/communities.
– Comments and discussions on data files (original or modified).
– Approval/rejection and rating of data files as an indicator of quality.
Another feature of the ENGAGE platform is the ability to program on its data by providing a special interface (Application Programming Interface-API), which consists of two components: The search API, which aims to search and retrieve content from the ENGAGE platform, and the release API, which is available to public sector organizations that wish to integrate the release flow of their own management systems, to automatically submit or update datasets to the ENGAGE platform.
Collaborations and use of the ENGAGE platform
The ENGAGE platform coordinators recently collaborated with the Greek open data portal, data.gov.gr, providing expertise and software. The Greek portal, which also recently launched, reused and integrated parts of the ENGAGE platform infrastructure into its own infrastructure, practically validating the value and innovative nature of the ENGAGE platform.
Another example of how the ENGAGE platform can be used successfully is the collaboration with the Dutch Data Archiving and Network Services (DANS). DANS is a well-known data provider in the Netherlands that provides large volumes of research data from Dutch government agencies to analysts, students, citizens and anyone interested.
Although the DANS infrastructure provides important data and some tools for reusing and analyzing the quality of some of this data, it does not provide the ability to visualize the data on a map or the ability to discuss and work collaboratively.
The ENGAGE platform was used in this case to collaborate with some users to properly convert a data file originally published by DANS so that it could be visualized graphically and to assess its quality. The ENGAGE platform infrastructure offered many tools that are useful for discussing, visualizing and evaluating the data. When there were questions or problems, the ENGAGE user community was consulted on how to solve their problems. Many users collaborated in order to achieve the conversion and visualization of the data graphically or on a map.
In the coming period, the ENGAGE platform will seek resources from public and private entities, exploring different business models. In any case, it will be available at least until the summer of 2015 and invites people to join the ENGAGE community and benefit from its data and services.
Source: newsbeast.gr
