With the main aim of promoting the culture of open data, the INTERSTAT consortium launched in the first nine months of the project a crucial initiative involving several projects co- funded by the Connecting Europe Facility programme.
Background
In February 2020, the European Commission announced the European Strategy for Data, aiming at creating a single market for data to be shared and exchanged across sectors efficiently and securely within the EU. Behind this endeavour stands the Commission’s goal to get ahead with the European data economy in a way that fits European values of self-determination, privacy, and fair competition for which the Commission defined nine initial domains, all driven by sector-specific requirements: industrial (manufacturing), green deal, mobility, health, financial, energy, agriculture, public administration, just to mention some.
In this context Open Data plays a key role. Specifically the Open Data calls proposed actions address the generation of cross-border and/or cross-domain services re-using information made discoverable/available through the European Data Portal in combination with other sources of information. This means that data should be drawn from at least two different sources, where applicable, and/or be relevant for more than one Member State in terms of geographical data coverage and/or usefulness.
Objective of the Open Data Cluster
The creation of the cluster intends to add further objectives to the mentioned ones, which can only be achieved if the forces of many initiatives are combined. Below the list of the ambitious goals:
- sharing technical and legal issues in order to improve the performance of the solutions developed and implemented;
- increase the number of harmonized data, through an exchange of data experiences among the projects;
- creation of common best practices in order to widen the range of information to stakeholders, limiting the fragmentation of information coming from different projects;
- spread, maximize and empower the exploitation plan of each projects, also participating in common events;
- ETSI NGSI-LD, implemented by FIWARE Context Broker components, as a standard mechanism for effective data exchange among participants for some of the project financed
These initial points which may be increased and/or modified in the coming months depending on the results and the pilotis activities of each project.
On 18 May 2021, the first kick-off meeting of the Open Data Cluster took place. All coordinators who joined presented their projects and outlined the first problems they are facing opening a debate on:
- common key technical topics to collaborate (e.g technical activities, asset to be reused)
- collaboration to mutual support pilots and stakeholders,
- common exploitation strategies and Definition of the next cluster activities, including next meetings and dissemination events for mutual participation
Currently members of the Open Data cluster are:
A second meeting to implement the actions is planned in October 2021
