On 14 January, Flemish regional representatives met with European Commission colleagues from various DGs to demo their solution supporting local governments in managing their decisions with Linked (Open) Data.

The Flemish government recognizes the potential of managing local decisions with open linked data, which offers the benefits of increased transparency - as decisions are no more hidden in paper based or unstructured repositories – and improved efficiency of services by allowing for reuse of those data.

The first step of Flanders has consisted in maintaining an agreed common vocabulary based on ISA2 core vocabularies and other international standards. This vocabulary is exposed as a standard, which the municipalities’ service providers can reuse.

The regional level scrapes then the municipalities’ web sites to gather the decision data and offers a consolidated repository of those data. To lead by example, Flanders also developed a minimum viable product: an open source editor. This allows for editing annotated pages so the stored data can be scraped. Following the municipality elections in 2018, more than 130 municipalities used the tool in production.

Flanders considers enriching the solution to provide evidence based decisions by simulating the outcome of potential decisions in the virtual space of collected data before applying the decision providing the best outcome in the physical space.

Additionally, Flanders started a collaboration at national level to assess the reproducibility of the solution there.

At the event, the participants agreed on a series of actions to make the most out of the collaboration between EC services and this Flanders’ initiative.

Would you like to get informed about the next steps? Please drop us an e-mail at EU-legal-interoperability@ec.europa.eu !

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