The 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research – dg.o 2018 will be hosted by Delft University of Technology, from 30 May till 1 June 2018. The dg.o conferences are an established forum for presentation, discussion, and demonstration of interdisciplinary research on digital government, political participation, civic engagement, technology innovation, applications, and practice. Each year the conference brings together scholars recognized for the interdisciplinary and innovative nature of their work, their contributions to theory (rigor) and practice (relevance), their focus on important and timely topics and the quality of their writing. The 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research will feature the main theme of “Governance in the data age”.
The KCOD contributed to the 17th European Conference on Digital Government ECDG 2017 from 12-13 June 2017. Bastiaan van Loenen presented the paper entitled “Log File Analytics for Gaining Insight into Actual Use of Open Data” based on the research of Wouter Labots. Following open data policies worldwide, an increasing number of public organisations has now published open data that is free to be used by anyone. However, despite the significant increase in use of this open data, the open data providers are mostly not aware of their users and the way in which the data is actually re-used. We explored the use of log files of the actual use of open data to identify the users and to explore how the open data is being used. By means of a case study in which we apply log file analytics to the Dutch open geographical data portal we show that this approach is promising for analysing open data use. This approach will yield many new insights for open data providers to improve and fine-tune their open data offer and policy makers will be provided with data on actual use to evaluate their open data policies. Our analysis shows that citizens are a much heavier user of open data than currently assumed: citizens as major users of open government data should be taken much more seriously in the demand driven open data policies. We recommend transferring the pilot project into a permanent monitoring instrument for open data use and exploring additional analytics for using the rich data that log files provide for.
Several KCOD researchers contributed to the 5th bi-annual TILTing Perspectives conference organised by the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) from 17-19 May 2017. Lorenzo Dalla Corte was chair of the session ‘Data Science, Civil Rights and Activism’. Bastiaan van Loenen was co-author of a paper on ‘Data sharing mechanisms and privacy challenges in Data Collaboratives: Delphi study of most important issues’, which was presented by Ella Kolkowska (Örebro University) and Iryna Susha (Örebro University/TU Delft). In this paper they explore the concept of ‘data collaboratives’ – cross sector partnerships to leverage new sources of digital data for addressing societal problems. Many of these new sources of digital data, such as “data exhaust” from mobile apps, search engines, personal sensors, are collected by companies. The paper identifies and defines the most important privacy challenges that need to be addressed in the context of data collaboratives and provides guidance on how data can be successfully shared in data collaboratives while respecting data protection interests.
KCOD researcher and PhD candidate Agung Indrajit presented his short paper on ‘Multi-Domain Master Spatial Data Management for Open SII in Indonesian Smart Cities’ at the AGILE 2017 Conference. AGILE 2017, the annual international conference on Geographic Information Science organized the Association of European Geo-Information Laboraties (AGILE), was held from 9 -12 May in Wageningen, the Netherlands. This year’s conference theme was Societal Geo-Innovation, and several topics were covered: Big Spatial Data, Analysis and Visualization, Volunteered Geographic Information and Community Observatories, Socio-Economic Impact Assessment of GI and GIScience, and Technology Education and Training. Agung presented some of the first results of his PhD research as part of the conference track on ‘Spatial Temporal Analysis’.
The pre-conference workshop ‘Open Data for Open Cities: Re-use and discovery level‘ was held at the 20th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science, Wageningen, 9th May 2017. Key topics of the workshop were the impact of open data in cities and spatial point analysis processes. During the workshop, Bastiaan van Loenen gave a presentation on the relevance and importance of geoportals as part of the open data ecosystem. In his presentation, he presented some key results and findings of his research on geoportals worldwide.
Recently, the section Geo-information and Land Policy (Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft) and the University of Leiden joined hands in research into the state of digitalisation of land registers and public records in EU countries. The Centre for Safety and Security of the Strategic Alliance Leiden-Delft-Erasmus, a three university cooperation, has been awarded a grant for this project in 2015. Digitalisation of land register systems and public records makes a full electronic handling of real estate transactions possible. This ‘e-conveyancing’ offers promising prospects for the facilitation of a cross-border property market. Besides advantages like cost savings and accelerating the legal transactions of registered property, there are also risks involved such as fraud, which should be minimised. Currently, the status of e-conveyancing within the EU is being inventoried as well as the issues of cyber security. The second phase will have an in depth character, thus forming a basis for further working out a doctoral research.
The Ministry of Interior of Taiwan and the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association (GSDI) together organized the 15th GSDI World Conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The conference lasted for five days, from 29 November to 2nd December in 2016. The main theme of the conference was Spatial Enablement in Smart Homeland, including three main topics of Smart Disaster Prevention, Smart Transportation and Smart City.
An E-GOS presentation was given on the topic of ‘Analyzing recent trends and developments in the SDI network’. The presentation built further on earlier research on the development and application of the network approach on spatial data infrastructures in Flanders. Using the analysis of the Flemish SDI network in 2008 as a starting point, the presentation examined how the network of spatial data flows has changed in recent years, and how these changes are driven or influenced by different technological and non-technological developments. The presentation showed how recent developments such as the implementation of network services and the application of linked and open data have steadily transformed and shaped the network of spatial data flows.
On 6 December 2016, Frederika Welle Donker successfully defended her PhD thesis ‘From access to re-use: a user’s perspective on public sector information availability’.
With more public sector geographic information becoming available as open data and with rapid technological developments, a trickle of web services and apps based on public sector information can be witnessed. However, the predicted free flow of information products and services based on public sector information has not eventuated yet. The main challenge for open data will be how to measure the actual impact of open government data. To do so, an open data assessment framework is required that evaluates open government data not only from a data supplier’s perspective, but also from a (re-)user’s perspective.
The Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) conference in Brussels in January 2016, led by Damian Clifford (KU Leuven), hosted a well-attended panel session ‘Data protection and open data in the smart city environment’ place. PhD Lorenzo dalla Corte (Knowledge Open Data), expert in this field, was the initiator of this panel. Also three other panelists (Rosana Lemut Strle, Fidel Santiago and Paolo Balboni) gave a presentation. The CPDP conference is the largest in the field of data security.
In their presentations, the panelists pointed out the dangers of large-scale smart technologies, that system designs must be sufficiently able to withstand them, and that the sector must actively enforce a sound legal framework. The panelists emphasised in their presentations that there is still no unambiguous solution for keeping in balance the interests of free provision of data on the one hand and the right to privacy and protection of personal data on the other. The discussion resulted in the call to abandon releasing data without but to switch to a system that reduces unwanted identification and data abuse.