Check out presentations and photos from SEMIC 2019 Conference

Nearly 200 participants attended the SEMIC 2019 Conference on "Linking data spaces for citizens" that took place on 21 October in Helsinki, Finland. An additional 186 people from all over the world followed the event via live stream. The presentations of all speakers and the photos from the conference are now available.

The 9th edition of the SEMIC Conference was co-organised by the ISA² Programme and the Finish Presidency of the Council of the EU. The event gathered policy makers, IT practitioners and researchers to participate in discussions on semantic interoperability for public administrations with a focus on creating value for citizens.

In her opening speech, Director-General of European Commission’s DG Informatics Gertrud Ingestad reminded everyone that interoperability is at the core of the Commission strategy. For the benefit of Europeans, the Commission wants to explore how to exchange information between public administrations in cross-border, cross-domain and semantically-reach manner. 

On a similar note, Sami Kivivasara, Director at the Information Policy Unit of the Finish Ministry of Finance, highlighted that facilitating the use of data enables the provision of better services for citizens and makes public administrations work more efficiently and transparently.

Magdalena Cordero, Director of Information, Workplace and Innovation, at the European Court of Auditors (ECA), gave a keynote speech on how ECA is digitalising the audit process. She pointed out that building trust in new technologies is key for a successful digitalisation.

João Ricardo Vasconcelos, digital government policy analyst at the Public Governance Directorate of the OECD, presented the OECD framework for public sector data governance. The framework focuses on how to ensure that public administrations become more and more proactive in anticipating citizens’ needs.

Chief Digital Officer at the City of Helsinki, Mikko Rusama, supported the concept of citizen-driven services in the main session presentation. He gave concrete examples of how the city of Helsinki proactively identifies services that better match the evolving needs of its citizens. 

The morning part was concluded with a session on the work done on the Linked Data Showcase pilot. The speakers demonstrated the value for public administrations of interlinking data from various sources.

Afternoon parallel sessions

In the afternoon, the conference participants had the opportunity to discover inspiring cross-border examples of data exchange between public administrations as well as the potential of new technologies in giving citizens more control over their own data.

Emanuele Baldacci, Director of Digital Services at DG Informatics, concluded that the big ambition of the Commission is to build a government-to-government sharing information platform. This will allow delivering user-driven services. Trust, quality and security will characterise the way the government platform of the future is built.