The PSI Directive implementation is a multi-speed mechanism, according to conclusions drawn during the third Share-PSI 2.0 workshop which took place in Timisoara (Romania) on March 16 and 17.
Share-PSI 2.0 defines itself as the European network for the exchange of experience and ideas around implementing Open Data policies in the public sector, as required by the PSI Directive. This directive forces EU Members State administrations to share, publish and open their own data, freely or at low cost.
Share-PSI workshops bring together government departments, universities and standards organisations to "identify what does and doesn't work, what is and isn't practical, what can and can't be expected of different stakeholders", the project website states.
This initiative is driven by best practices and experiences. Most interestingly, the output of the workshops is offered as input in the World Wide Web (W3C) Data on the Web Working Group, with a view to creating a global standard. The W3C is an international consortium responsible for defining the standards of the Web (HTML 5 for example). Share-PSI workshops are "designed to bring together people around Europe to share best practices in implementing the PSI Directive," Phil Archer, Share-PSI coordinator at W3C (where he coordinates activities around data) explained. To date 25 countries are represented, but this is the first workshop held in Eastern Europe, he said. The 1st workshop took place in Samos (Greece) and the second one in Lisbon (Portugal). This 3rd workshop, under the slogan "Identifying Data Sets for Publication Open Data Priorities and Engagement ", focused on community engagement and how to find the right data to publish.
The workshop allowed stakeholders to "share experience between countries that are at different stages in developing their own Open Data public sector sharing procedures, activities and strategies. Part of that is driven by the PSI directive which requires EU Member States to share their data", Archer said. Some of them …are leading the pack. Others are forced to share and are not especially keen about it."
"EU provides the basic legal framework and countries can go beyond"
"There will always be several speeds (of implementation) because some topics gain political attention faster in some countries than in others. What we provide is the basic legal framework and countries can go beyond", Szymon Lewandowski, Legal and Policy Officer at DG Connect, based in Luxembourg, said.
"The new revision of the PSI Directive in 2013 gave a new impetus to awareness. There is a legal framework, but what is most important is the cultural change inside the public sector, at the local or national level, across Europe", he added. "As the EU, we provide the basic set, and we really hope that the national authorities will do their part. And there are already some nice initiatives, like in Spain and Romania, which explain within the administrations why we need Open Data, what is the benefit and how it can help societies."
Lewandowski admitted that implementation of the PSI Directive takes time, "what I see is a general tendency to gain more awareness of those topics in countries that used to lag behind", he commented.
Data quality: lack of a standard
For example, one of the issues highlighted during the conference was the lack of a standard for Open Data quality. This was the theme of a session called "How good is good enough? A common language for quality", moderated by Makx Dekkers, who works for the EC with the ISA programme.
"There is a lot of talk about the need to publish “high-quality” PSI. While it is certainly important that data has sufficient quality to make it useful and usable for users and re-users, we currently lack a common or standard way to express what the quality of data is", he said. During this session, he tried to define what a data quality standard could look like and how a standard could help administrations make their own assessment.