WHAT THE DELETION OF THE OPEN KNOWLEDGE INSTITUTE OF GREECE SHOWS
The available open data in Greece remains scattered, unclassified, without provision for machine recognition and with limited potential for use in applications .
This is the result of the census carried out by the Open Knowledge Foundation of Greece (Open Knowledge Greece https://okfn.gr) participating this year in the data survey organized by the Open Knowledge International (Open Knowledge International https://okfn.org) for the calculation of the Open Data Index of countries 2014 (https://global.census.okfn.org/), the results of which were recently announced. This index synthesizes data from different thematic areas (transport, budget and public spending, election results, business registers, digital maps, legislation and data on environmental pollution).
It should be noted that the Open Knowledge Foundation of Greece has already implemented the open data censuses at the national level for the years 2013-2014 and the open data census at the city level for the year 2014, while the analysis of the results of the 2014 census has been published by the foundation and shared with the main Municipalities of the country (https://okfn.gr/2014/05/city-opendatacensus/).
Conclusions
One of the main findings is that few cities and few public bodies have proceeded to make open data available beyond the documents posted on “Di@ygeia”.
This can be explained based on the existing legislation, up until 26/10/2014, which obliged organizations to post these documents. “Di@ygeia” is, however, a very useful and open repository of documents-decisions, but not data. The result was that the further availability and use of open data became very difficult.
In addition, most of the data, where available, do not have a license or terms of use, as a result of which they are not essentially open. In several cases of cities, the contradictory phenomenon of some data being provided without a license was observed, while documents relating to these data were found on the “Di@ygeia” website with an open license.
The data is scattered across various sources on the internet and not in a central location of organizations or the Greek Government (https://data.gov.gr/). Most datasets are non-machine readable, making it impossible to develop applications that are useful for the citizen and promote innovation and new entrepreneurship.
The Open Knowledge Foundation of Greece, as mentioned in the related announcement, has officially submitted proposals regarding further adoption and their dissemination. Some of these are:
- Making data available under a specific license. OKF is at the forefront of the dissemination of open data by making the Greek open data license available to the State (https://opendatacommons.gr/).
- Implementation of initiatives, actions and discussions to inform citizens and public organisations about the existence of data.
- Contribution and participation of citizens, where possible, in the control of data.
- Provision of data in machine‑readable formats and their continuous updating.
- Provision of data in its entirety and without applying any filter.
- Presentation of the available data from municipalities and other organizations on specialized websites (data portals e.g. the CKAN of Open Knowledge used among others by the H.B. and the EU) even if they are also found in other sources.
- Exploitation of data for the development of applications that will contain innovative services for citizens (such as appsforthessaloniki https://thessaloniki.appsforgreece.eu/ and hackathess https://hackathess.eu/)
- Utilization and reuse of the wealth of open applications that exist, adoption of good practices of the International Open Knowledge Foundation in Greece.
Source: imerisia.gr
