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.