Information and Communication Technologies have an unprecedented potential to improve the responsiveness of governments to the needs of citizens and have long been recognised as a key strategic tool to enable reforms in the public sector. During the last years, this potential has started to be dealt with in a multi-disciplinary way, giving birth to new research communities dealing with governance and policy modelling, modelling and simulation of complex systems, public administration information systems, open governance and social media. However, this potential is to this day non-systematically exploited, as there are significant barriers that hinder the effective exploration, management and distribution of the vast amounts of available public sector data towards the research communities.
The main goal of the ENGAGE project is to deploy and use an advanced service infrastructure, incorporating distributed and diverse public sector information resources as well as data curation, semantic annotation and visualisation tools, capable of supporting scientific collaboration and governance-related research from multi-disciplinary scientific communities, while also empowering the deployment of open government data to citizens.
The ENGAGE consortium comprises of 9 partners from Belgium, Germany, Greece, Israel, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, with an excellent track record both in the eInfrastructures and the Governance domain (NTUA, FOKUS, STFC, University of Aegean, TU DELFT), including world-leaders in cloud infrastructures (IBM, Microsoft and INTRASOFT International) and a large network of scientific data diffusion (EUROCris).
Following on Open Data initiatives throughout Europe, ENGAGE has established links with numerous National and International public sector organisations, research communities, open data experts and standardisation fora. The project is supported by the Greek NREN and NGI node GRNET, providing the infrastructure for service provision.
Technology solution
Technology choice: Standards-based technologyLessons learnt
The following actions should be taken as emerged from the ENGAGE open data platform implementation:
- Raise the legal and administrative barriers, which prevent the spreading of open data;
- Support research on metadata, core vocabularies and visualisation, as new ways of discovering and using open data;
- Promote innovation and entrepreneurship on open data applications for the public;
- Support open data use by science, in a global effort to reach evidence-based decision making on societal problems;
- Promote scientific approaches in solving interoperability issues, and especially the Interoperability Scientific Foundations;
- Strive for open data and interoperability ‘killer-apps’, in order to illustrate the power of ICT tools towards wider audiences;
- Foster collaboration among scientific communities, industry, SMEs, public sector and citizens, towards an ecosystem, where the immense potential of open, interoperable data will be exploited.