CEF Big Data Test Infrastructure presented at the workshop ‘Public sector data: still a missed opportunity?
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How do European public administrations deal with the challenges relating to data availability, data silos?
On 4 June 2019, the Italian Digital Transformation team, hosted by the European Commission, held a workshop exploring best practices and solutions to the identified problems.
The EU has sought to address these issues through a number of policy initiatives, such as the European Data Portal, the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Digital programme, the ISA² programme and the free flow of non-personal data, to name some examples.
In the eGovernment Action Plan Steering Board, several EU Member States have intensified their collaboration to help tackle these issues related to Data Analytics, with Italy leading the workstream on Data Analytics.
In the Survey on “Public Sector Data Analytics”, recently promoted by the Italian government’s Digital Transformation team, results showed that for many Member States, these challenges persist. As such, Italy decided to hold this workshop.
One of the most important takeaways from this workshop was that Member States should take the opportunity offered by the CEF Big Data Test Infrastructure (BDTI) Building Block, which allows users to experiment with big data.
During the afternoon session dedicated to interoperability, Bram de Schouwer and Lorenzo Carbone, from the Commission’s BDTI team presented the Building Block and what public administrations stand to gain.
CEF BDTI offers virtual environment templates to explore and experiment with various data sources, software tools and big data techniques. This allows public administrations to focus on gathering knowledge, insight and value from their data, instead of setting up and maintaining a complex experimental environment. CEF BDTI provides:
- Interoperability through environments and tools make use of open source and widely accepted technologies and standards;
- Performance through an architecture that can easily scale its resource;
- Scalability as data sets can increase or decrease in size over time;
- Reliability and availability as data is stored securely and pilots don't fail mid-process;
- Knowledge base and advisory through a knowledge base; and
- Proven best practices and tools
During this workshop, the CEF BDTI team presented how CEF BDTI promotes ‘interoperability by default’ and applies interoperability principles at the various levels of government, local, regional, national and international. They also demonstrated how CEF BDTI fosters interoperability between different sources, which can be improved through big data techniques to allow the reuse of data and, ultimately, transform it into knowledge.
The Commission is also organising a webinar on the CEF Service Offering Canvas for Digital Agencies. Digital Agencies develop and manage a number of open, reusable solutions that cover common needs in the field of digitisation, such as login, authentication, secure delivery of data, electronic signatures and others.