Project BeOPEN: Addressing Societal Challenges with Open Data
We as Arthur's Legal are proud to announce that we are now part of this new European Commission funded project BeOPEN. The aim of BeOpen is to support public administrations at local, regional and national level in increasing the availability and usability of public sector information (High Value Datasets). This will facilitate organisations and public entities to re-use open public data across the EU for the development of information products and services.
You can expect from our end more posts about BeOPEN and the different pilots and progress made within the projects. Especially on our LinkedIN page we will be highlighting you about the different pilot activities addressing a variety of societal challenges. Therefore hereby a short summary about the project BeOPEN to share with you the overall objective of the project and our role within the consortium. We are looking forward to bring in our expertise, for which we as Arthur's Legal, Strategies & Systems have been assigned, in order to get to the end-result of the project.
THE OPEN DATA FRAMEWORK
What will be our role within the project? Where do we exactly add value?
Within this consortium we will among other topics help out with the BeOpen Framework for Open High Value Datasets and its validation and replication, use cases, challenges, EU-wide services, Strategic deployment, dissemination, exploitation, legal, ethical and other requirements and datasets. BeOpen seeks to provide an integrated framework, tailored for public administrations, composed of technical tools, methodologies and guidelines to improve overall open data quality, interoperability and availability of High Value Datasets.
"BeOpen will enable the development of new digital and AI services by facilitating access to and use of EU Public Sector High Value Datasets"
The biggest challenge and objective from our end in this project is to get aligned, collect the right data, involve the right stakeholders, come up with the right structure in order to draft and deploy the Open Framework. We are thrilled to this joint effort and look very much forward to the process and outcome. This end-result will be of tremendous value and help for public bodies and all of us - citizens.
The Open Framework is expected to increase the availability and usability of Open Data provided by the public sector.The BeOpen framework will be built on results coming from four CEF projects that focus their activities on different aspect of open data management; these are INTERSTAT (data interoperability and cross border services based on open data), Spotted (access and processing of Earth Observation data), GreenMov (management of mobility related data), and ODALA (data management for cities and data market), as well as on the guiding principles stated in the Living-in.EU declaration1, with particular attention to the technologies as key enablers and interoperable digital platforms based on open standards and technical specifications,
What will this solution offer and why is it a necessity for the Public Administration?
The solution will provide to Public Administration a customizable and easy to use ‘tool box’ to manage High Value Datasets and make them available via APIs or for bulk download in order to be reused by any interested stakeholder, and to allow the publication on National Open Data Portals. On the other hand, the framework will include tools that aim at facilitating companies as SMEs, start-ups, industries, as well as public organization to access and use High Value Datasets, integrating different open datasets including the ones published by the Public Administration and the ones already available at European
level (e.g. satellite images coming from Earth observation services as Copernicus, statistics provided by Eurostat, etc.), supporting the implementation of EU-wide digital service, but in particular AI applications. From an overall perspective, the framework will allow to support the whole pipeline of the open data lifecycle with the final aim of improving the potential of existing and new open data datasets maximizing their value in building IT services. The aim is also to provide to PA a framework that can minimize the cost of the data curation activities that usually require a lot of effort and competences to be performed. Moreover, the framework aims to build a thriving ecosystem of private actors to generate both economic and societal value from data, whilst ensuring that privacy, security, safety and ethical standards are adequately and appropriately adhered to.
The overall BeOpen framework will be applied in 8 real-life pilots across 6 countries, using regional datasets. The pilots will take place in Napoli - Italy, Attica-Greece, Herne- Germany, Vilinius - Lithuania, Porto - Portugal and the other three pilots will take place in Cartagena- Molina de Segura, Torre Pacheco - Spain, addressing three different topics.
The different challenges which will be addressed within the pilots are: mobility, urban security, environment, and natural disasters challenges in several EU regions. Underneath you find all the pilots and their objectives:
This collaboration reinforces the project's goal of developing new digital and AI services by facilitating access to and utilization of EU Public Sector High-Value Datasets.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and shared data models
The BeOpen framework will include open source tools, replicable data pipelines and ontologies, and best practices to (1) perform open data
collection, curation, semantic annotation, data and metadata harmonization (according to DCAT-AP), (2) publish in machine-readable format (in bulk or via APIs) public open data also in compliance with the European Data Portal (https://data.europa.eu/), allowing it to automatically harvest the datasets.
Are you interested to learn more? Feel welcome to read more about this transformative alliance and its impact on innovation on our LinkedIN page or BeOPEN LinkedIN and on the BeOPEN website.
We are looking forward for the great collaboration #BeOpenDEP!