Project summary

The OpenGovIntelligence project aims at stimulating sustainable economic growth in Europe through fostering innovation in society and enterprises. Towards this end, OpenGovIntelligence suggests a holistic approach for the modernization of Public Administration (PA) by exploiting Linked Open Statistical Data (LOSD) technologies. This includes new business processes, policies, and tools that will enable the active participation of the society and enterprises in data sharing and in the co-production of innovative data-driven public services. The objectives of the OpenGovIntelligence project include:

  • The identification of challenges in opening up and exploiting LOSD for the co-production of innovative data-driven public services.

  • The creation of a framework comprising business processes, policies, and data infrastructure architectures. This framework specifies a user-centric LOSD Innovation Ecosystem that orchestrates the collaboration of society and PA for opening up and exploiting LOSD to address relevant challenges and facilitate the co-production of innovative data-driven public services.

  • The delivery of the OpenGovIntelligece ICT toolkit comprising easy-to-use and user-centric tools to facilitate realizing the LOSD Innovation Ecosystem.

The OpenGovIntelligence pilots in six countries to validate and prove the usability and effectiveness of the LOSD Innovation Ecosystem. The pilots will develop services at both national and local level to tackle societal and PA challenges in various problem areas such as internal decision-making in PAs, enhancing eservices provided by Points of Single Contact in Europe, and improving policy-making in the areas of environment protection, economic growth, and unemployment.

Work Package 1: Challenges and needs identification

Work Package 2: Framework creation

Work Package 3: ICT tools development

Work Package 4: Pilots Planning and Evaluation

Work Package 5: Dissemination and Exploitation

Work Package 6: Project Management

 

Work Package 1: Challenges and needs identification

Objectives:

  • To understand the capacities of existing data infrastructures.

  • To understand how service co-production can be performed in data-driven services.

  • To identify the challenges and needs regarding opening-up and exploiting LOSD.

  • To understand innovation in relation to accountable decision making based on better use of data.

Description of Work:

This work package aims at identifying the challenges and needs regarding political, legal, institutional, social and technical issues in opening-up and exploiting LOSD for the co-production of innovative data-driven services.

T1.1 State-of-the-art of data infrastructures (M1-M6, TU Delft):

This task refers to a thorough literature review regarding existing government and other data infrastructures. Precisely this task will investigate how existing data infrastructures are currently deployed within the public sector, and how they may be repurposed in the pursuit of innovation and creativity following a public-private collaboration approach.

T1.2 Elicitation of needs and expectations for service co-production:

This task aims at understanding how the co-production of public services can be applied to the production of qualitative data-driven public services. To this end, the public sector organizations of OpenGovIntelligence will be involved in order to facilitate the understanding of the relationship between citizens and public authorities and the expectations of citizens in how public authorities manages data that concern them.

T1.3 Identification of LOSD challenges and needs:

In this task the pilots of OpenGovIntelligence will be involved in order to identify the challenges and needs for opening-up and exploiting LOSD for the development of data-driven services based on advanced data analytics, machine learning techniques and visualizations. In particular this task draws on ethnographic methods such as interviews, questionnaires as well as the specification of a set of userstories and the organization of workshops to identify objectives regarding user requirements, best practices, models and challenges.

T1.4 Innovation in relation to decision making:

This task aims to realise how public administration will be transformed to innovation based on better use of data. The task will, hence, investigate an report on the relationship between innovation and decision making.

Description of Deliverables:

 

Work Package 2: Framework creation

Objectives:

To construct a framework comprising:

  • processes for opening up data
  • processes for feeding society’s needs, data and feedback
  • strategies for innovation
  • policies for innovation
  • data infrastructure architecture

Description of Work:

This work package will construct the OpenGovIntelligence framework for opening up LOSD in a way that it will address relevant barriers and thus facilitate the co-production of innovative data-driven services. This include the processes for opening up data, the processes for feeding society’s feedback, data and needs and reuse back into delivery, and strategies and policies for innovation.

T2.1 OpenGovIntelligence Framework – first release

This task will introduce the first release of the OpenGovIntelligence framework that will go beyond and (re)define traditional processes defined by public authorities for satisfying the needs of the citizens and businesses as well as existing innovation strategies and policies in order to adapt them to the real needs of the society. Processes, policies and strategies will be transformed so as to be able to co-product services where businesses and citizens will be able to directly contribute and co-create new approaches. The framework will also define a data infrastructure architecture for LOSD and data-driven public services. This first release of OpenGovIntelligence framework will draw upon OpenGovIntelligence challenges and needs identified in WP1.

T2.2 OpenGovIntelligence Framework

This task will produce the final release of OpenGovIntellgence framework that will tap into the first release of the framework.

Description of Deliverables:

 

Work Package 3: ICT tools development

Objectives:

  • To develop ICT tools for creating LOSD from various sources
  • To develop ICT tools for expanding created LOSD
  • To develop ICT tools for exploiting created LOSD

Description of Work:

This work package will develop the OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools as a suite of open source and commercial tools. The developed ICT tools will support the OpenGovIntelligence framework created at work package 2 and will enable (a) the creation of LOSD from various sources including, (b) the expansion of LOSD with datasets from existing sources and (c) the exploitation of LOSD for the co-production of public services.

T3.1 OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools – first release:

In this task, the first release of the OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools will be developed drawing upon the first release of OpenGovIntelligence framework (T2.1). This first release will cover the development of ICT tools regarding the creation, expansion and exploitation of LOSD.

With regards to the creation of LOSD, OpenGovIntelligence will design and develop ICT tools that will allow and facilitate the transforming of public sector data coming from various sources including sensors, crowd-sourced data, mobile applications, text based sources such as social media and spreadsheets to standard machine readable forms and specifically to RDF data cubes. These tools will also allow the creation and management of metadata providing structural and provenance information based on existing vocabularies including RDF data cube, DCAT, SKOS, XKOS vocabularies. Finally OpenGovIntelligence for LOSD creation will ensure the validation as well as the high quality of the generated LOSD and their metadata.

With regards to the expansion of LOSD, OpenGovIntelligence will design and develop ICT tools that will allow and facilitate the expansion of LOSD with compatible data sets coming from existing sources such as Eurostat, Digital Agenda and World Bank but also from other public authorities of national or local level. Towards this end, the identification and linking with the compatible datasets should also be enabled. The expansion functionalitiesof OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools will also enable advanced operations such as roll-up/drill-down and dimension reduction.

With regards to the exploitation of LOSD, OpenGovIntelligence will design and develop ICT tools that will allow and facilitate the reuse of LOSD in the context of co-producing public services based on advanced data analytics and machine learning techniques through intuitive interfaces and visualizations.

All OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools will be built upon existing linked data tools developed by the partners of the consortium or other open source solutions (such the R project for statistical analysis). Moreover OpenGovIntelligence plans to adopt as a back-end an existing Linked Data Platform (such as OpenLink Virtuoso or Apache Marmotta) facilitate the management of issues such as the storing and indexing of linked data.

T3.2 OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools – second release

Based on the OpenGovIntelligence challenges and needs from WP1, the OpenGovIntelligence framework (T2.2) as well as the pilots operation and initial OpenGovIntelligence evaluation (T4.2), the second release of the OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools will be developed.

T3.3 OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools

This task will deliver the third and final version of OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools. This final release will draw upon the final versions of OpenGovIntelligence framework (T2.2) as well as the pilots operation and interim OpenGovIntelligence evaluation (T4.4).

Description of Deliverables:

This WP comprises two deliverables (a report and the software tools) for each of the three releases of the OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools.

  • D3.3: OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools – second release (not yet available)
  • D3.4: Report on OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools – second release (not yet available)
  • D3.5: OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools (not yet available)
  • D3.6: Report on OpenGovIntelligence ICT tools (not yet available)

 

Work Package 4: Pilots Planning and Evaluation

Objectives:

  • To create and implement a detailed evaluation methodology for measuring system, service and project success
  • To roll-out pilots involving LOSD repositories in public authorities in six countries i.e. El from Lithuania, MI from Ireland, MKM from Estonia, MAREG from Greece, VLO from Belgium and Trafford Council from the UK
  • To provide training to public administrations, businesses and citizens on the use of services developed by the OpenGovIntelligence project
  • To issue practical recommendations and tutorials for public authorities regarding various issues of opening-up and exploiting statistical data

Description of Work:

This work package pilots and evaluates the various iterations and components of the OpenGovIntelligence framework and ICT tools.

T4.1 Pilots and evaluation plan

Based on the results of the identification of the OpenGovIntelligence challenges and needs (WP1), this task will present the details of each pilot.

T4.2 Pilots operation and initial OpenGovIntelligence evaluation

This task deals with the actual execution of the pilots. This will involve all the partners that will undertake the operation, support and maintenance of the pilots. The initial evaluation plan will be applied in this task in order to perform the evaluation of the first release of OpenGovIntelligence services and to elicit the most important lessons and conclusions.

T4.4 Pilots operation and interim OpenGovIntelligence evaluation

This task refers to the execution of the second round of evaluation according to the updated plan produced in T4.3.

T4.6 Pilots operation and final OpenGovIntelligence evaluation

This task refers to the execution of the third round of evaluation according to the updated plan produced in T4.5.

T4.7 Capacity building

This task involves the training of OpenGovIntelligence stakeholders i.e. public administrations, businesses and citizens in order to increase their capacity in using the services developed by the project. At least three workshops will be organized for this reason for each of the three key stakeholders of the OpenGovIntelligence project, namely public administrations, businesses and citizens. Moreover, OpenGovIntelligence aims at issuing and providing public authorities with a number of detailed practical recommendations and tutorials regarding political, institutional, technical, legal and social issues of opening-up and exploiting statistical data.

Description of Deliverables:

This WP includes evaluation plans for the three evaluation cycles of the OpenGovIntelligence Framework and tools along with the results of these evaluations. It also includes a deliverable documenting recommendations and tutorials.

  • D4.1: Pilots and Evaluation plan-v1
  • D4.2: Evaluation results - First round (not yet available)
  • D4.4: Pilots Evaluation results - Second round (not yet available)
  • D4.6: Pilots Evaluation results- Third round (not yet available)
  • D4.7: Recommendations and tutorials for opening-up and exploiting statistical data (not yet available)

 

Work Package 5: Dissemination and Exploitation

Objectives:

  • To fine-tune the dissemination and exploitation plan of the project.
  • To develop and maintain the project website and social media presence.
  • To generate communication materials of both academic / research and commercial/ business interest.
  • To organize a variety of targeted dissemination and exploitation activities in order to ensure that the project and its outcomes will be widely known and project impact will be at its highest.
  • To analyze the market and to position OpenGovIntelligence in it.
  • To identify potential key players for take-up activities.
  • To develop, evaluate and disseminate the OpenGovIntelligence business models.
  • To put research findings into practice by integrating them into innovative products and services.
  • To present the OpenGovIntelligence business plan.

Description of Deliverables:

 

Work Package 6: Project Management

Objectives:

  • Perform strategic and day-to-day administrative, financial, scientific and technical management of the project, according to the management structure described in Section 3.1 of Part B
  • Ensure the sound management of project activities and the fulfilment of project objectives.
  • Monitor resource usage, budget allocation and project cash flow.
  • Ensure efficient communication within the consortium and reassure effective liaison with the EC, other projects, communities and other bodies as required.
  • Deal with all ethical issues that might emerge during the project

Description of Work:

T6.4 Knowledge and data management

This task, in accordance with the H2020 rules related to the open access of data, will produce a data management plan where all aspects of data handling, treatment, reporting and access are clear to the partners. This document will describe information about the data (schemas, datasets, etc.) used within OpenGovIntelligence and the management of this data (what type of data, how the data will be collected, shared, handled, preserved, any used standard). The data management plan will be hosted within the project website, and a part of it will be made publicly accessible through the project’s dissemination activities.

Τ6.5 Ethics management

This task deals with ethical issues that might emerge from the research activities of the project. The results of this task will be published at M2, updated at M6 and then updated every 6 months during the lifetime of the project.

Description of Deliverables: