The Beyond Data Event was held on 29 March 2018 for the 9th time in Eindhoven. As part of the event, so-called round table sessions, were organised, in which participants could join an open discussion in a small group on a specific topic. Dr. Frederika Welle Donker of the Knowledge Centre Open Data was invited to facilitate a round table session on the governance of open data as part of the E-GOS Local project. The half-hour session was well attended by participants mainly from municipalities, provinces and research institutes. The discussion centred around the deliberations municipalities have to make to assess which data can or cannot be published as open data. Municipalities collect much data, but can the data be published as open data? How about privacy concerns? How about incomplete or imperfect data quality? How can municipalities move from one-way data portals to two-way communication and data exchange with citizens and companies? And how can citizens get access to data that may be politically sensitive, e.g. locations of crimes or actual air quality data? Experiences were shared and viewpoints exchanged. Half an hour proved to be too short to discuss all governance issues. It did provide a lively platform to air concerns.
An article on ‘Assessing the Openness of Spatial Data Infrastructures‘ has been published as part of the INSPIRE Section of IJSDIR. The article by Glenn Vancauwenberghe, Kotryna Valečkaitė, Bastiaan van Loenen and Frederika Welle Donker, introduces the Open Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) Assessment Framework as a new approach for assessing the openness of SDIs. Open SDIs are SDIs in which non-government actors such as businesses, citizens, researchers and non-profit organizations can contribute to the development and implementation of the SDI, use spatial data with as few restrictions as possible and benefit from using these geographic data. A pilot application of the new framework resulted in the Map of Open SDI in Europe, which aims to show the level of openness of national SDIs in Europe. The map could become a relevant and practical tool that shows the status of Open SDIs in Europe and supports decision makers and practitioners in making their own SDI more open.
On March 2 2018, the Knowledge Centre Open Data will present the status of open geographic data at the Open data day in Croatia. For more information see:
The Knowledge Centre Open Data is one of the organizers of the AGILE 2018 Pre-conference workshop ‘SDI Research and Strategies towards 2030: Renewing the SDI Research Agenda’. Aim of this Workshop is to initiate the definition of a renewed Spatial Data Infrastructure Research Agenda for ‘SDI Research and Strategies towards 2030’, incorporating both technical and non-technical perspectives and research challenges. The workshop will take place on Tuesday 12 June 2018, in Lund (Sweden).
On Saturday January 27th, knowledge center’s Lorenzo Dalla Corte co-chaired the Privacy Law Scholars Conference Europe (PLSC-Europe) as part of the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference. In the workshop work in progress papers were discussed. In the context of the General Data Protection Regulation and the draft e-privacy regulation, From data-driven profiling to digital stereotyping to new forms of discrimination, The rise of infomediaries and the privatization of data protection enforcement, Privacy in the era of machine learning, and Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR were among the appealing topics that were discussed.