 Yeah. All right. Good morning everybody. So Thank you very much for introducing me. So my name is Elaine Volos and I work for Cape Gemini Consulting, which is the lead partner of a bigger consortium working for the European Commission's European data portal. So today I will be talking about best practices and open data across Europe, but I will also specifically focus on Belgium. But before I do that, I'll give a brief introduction into what the European data portal is. Who here has ever heard of the European data portal? All right. Quite a few. I asked the same question last year and there were less people. So that's a good sign. Well, so basically what we do is we harvest all the metadata from all the national open data portals across Europe and the idea is that all the national open data portals harvest from within their country and we only harvest the one national open data portal. Where that's not yet possible, we also harvest more portals, but in the end the goal is that we only harvest one portal from each country. But of course we do a lot more than just harvesting the metadata. We also offer visualizations and quality checks. For example, in licensing there's a metadata quality checker. We also train the data publishers via eLearnings. There are 16 eLearning modules on the European data portal, which you can also connect to your own portal if you like. We also provide workshops for the national open data portal teams. We showcase events, news, best practices. So whenever there's something happening in Europe either we find out about it or national open data portal teams send us their information so we can share that with the European open data community. But of course we also measure the open data majority across Europe, which we do once every year. And I will also talk about that briefly. We convene meetings, webinars, events. For example, a month ago we published a report on the sustainability of open data portals. It was the second report going more into the impact and financing models. And last week, I think it was two weeks, last week it was I think the 28th of February we also organized a webinar on the same subject. We collect open data stories and feedback and of course we also share open source code. So just a few facts and figures. At the moment we have over 800,000 open data sets on the European data portal. Obviously I'm talking about metadata. We have one data set, which is from the European data portal itself. We feature the metadata in 24 languages. That's all the official languages of the European Union. Portals come from 34 countries and in total 79 catalogues. So as I said, we are striving to only have 34 catalogues, but this also includes geodata, which is not always the same as the national open data portal. So this is an overview of the open data benchmark we did last year. It was published in November 2017. As you can see, half of Europe is now called a trendsetter. And quite a few other countries, eight other countries are now called fast trackers. Where you see the big arrow, that's where Belgium is at the moment. In comparison to 2016, Belgium has actually gone up on almost all the different indicators that we measure. Which is obviously, well that's a very good development. And well, if we would continue this way then probably Belgium would also be called a trendsetter in 2018. That's of course not possible to have all the countries called trendsetters because there's nothing to set the trend for anymore. So we're now going into the next three years where we're actually going to shift from data quantity to data quality. And we're also going to put a lot more focus on the impact of open data because in the end that's what it's all about. So the measurement itself will become tougher. And yeah, we really want to focus also on the data quality aspect. So this will look different again in 2018. So when we zoom in on Belgium, what exactly do we see? Well first of all we see that the open data policy is, well it's actually quite good. It's at 74%. You can then, well you can think of data uploaded automatically, which actually Belgium is the only country where 100% of data is uploaded automatically. There's three to five events held annually, which can also be more than five events. That would have been the other option. There's a predefined approach to ensure the data sets are up to date. Well we're now also going to measure whether there's trainings organized for civil servants, for example, to really help them get the right skills to actually publish the data. The usability of the National Open Data Portal is also very good. It's gone up. The only thing that is not possible yet is to contribute to the portal, but a lot of the features are already in place. Licensing has also gone up in comparison to last year, or to 2016 and national coordination has also significantly improved. Differences, for example, national coordination, which is definitely very important. So now all the regional portals are integrated, which is not the case yet in 2016, and there's also now many regional data initiatives, which before was some. When you look at the presence of open data, the impact and the use of open data in comparison to the EU average, you actually see that Belgium scores almost average on the presence of open data and also on the use of open data. In this way, so the presence of the open data policy is the combination of the open data policy, the licensing and the national coordination. Only on the impact of open data, Belgium scores significantly lower, so that's also what I'm going to focus on in my next few slides. In some countries, we see that the top data domains are not actually being measured due to privacy concerns, for example, in Germany. This is not the case in Belgium. In Belgium, you can actually measure their statistics on what, for example, the most consulted domains are, which is very important, but also if there's priority domains. And this is important because then you can really funnel or focus on where you should put your priority and where apparently most reuse is in the country. So that's why we also measure where most re-uses go to. So some examples, some best practices from across Europe. When we look at the political impact, there is an example from France where, for example, the publishing of money allocated to members of the parliament can be checked, which can then also lead to more accountability of these members of the parliament. But you can also look at education. So there's an example from Norway where there's a specific great calculator which helps students to make the best informed decision on what kind of study they'd like to do and whether they actually have the right courses. They've done the right courses to actually go into another study. So that saves them a lot of time, which, of course, also has a better benefit then. So the service provided there is improved. When you look at the social impact, this is something that we're changing in 2018. So far, the social impact was based on marginalized groups and on environmental impact. From this year onwards, we're going to separate the two where we have a specific indicator for environmental impact. So you can think of for marginalized groups, Blind Square in Finland, where it helps blind people navigate better through city, which improves their mobility and therefore the quality of life within the city. You can also think of, in terms of environmental impact, you can think of Geospatium Lab in Spain, which helps agricultural companies or farmers to select the best possible pesticides for their land, which, of course, then has a positive impact on the human health and also on the environment. But you can also think about applications that measure the air quality in the city, for example. So I would be interested to know what the level, what the air quality is in the Wettstraat in Brussels, for example. That would be very interesting to know. No, I don't want to know. Economic impact. What can you think of when you want to measure the economic impact? Often for politicians, this is the most important one, because we're talking about money. In November 2015, the European data portal did a big research on what we found in Europe, research done in Europe. And you can find this on the European data portal. It's about creating value through open data, where you can get lots of information, for example, on how this is measured in different countries. But another example is, for example, the Dublin dashboard, where you can track the economic developments going on in the city. You can see per area how the level of employment is, or how the housing market is doing, what the average cost is of a house. And you can compare that in different areas, and therefore you have a better idea of the economic development in the city, which is available for everyone. And also, every quarter, they actually publish the monitor, where again there's a summary of what's been happening in the city. But you can also measure the economic impact by just focusing on one specific area. So here an example comes from Spain, which, well, every year they conduct a study, which is also published on the National Open Data Portal on the intermediary industry. So basically, the industry that's between the data publishers and the re-users of data. And for example, in 2017, they found that there's 638 companies that are using open data as an important part of their business model in Spain, and then they can also measure how many jobs are created, how much money is being made through this sector. So if you want to have some ideas, some inspiration, these are examples you can look at. But you can, of course, also go to the report that we published in November 2017 on this subject, where you can find lots more information and ideas that could also be used in Belgium. So when we did our study, which was published in November 2015, we actually found that there's 325 billion euros in direct market size between 2016 and 2020 for the EU28+. That's the 28 European Union countries plus the Efter countries, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. But there's a difference. When you look at the economic impact, you can talk about direct economic impact and indirect economic impact. Direct benefits are how many jobs are being created through open data or how much money is being saved in the public administration because open data helps being more efficient. So we found that every year, more than 25,000 jobs are being created in the EU just by open data alone, which will only go up because there's more and more data being published and therefore more and more applications being developed. But you can also talk about indirect economic benefits and then, for example, parking apps help you to save time or not waste as much time because the app will tell you where there's an available parking spot instead of you having to look for a parking spot. But you can also think about the energy savings because data is being published and therefore there's more insights in how this energy is actually being used and if that could be done in a smarter way. So these differences are important to remember when you're looking at the economic impact of open data. We also did a study where we looked at the reuse of open data by the private sector. This was published in January 2017 and what we found is that most companies are actually looking for geospatial data, statistical data or company data. Now if you look at one of the previous slides on Belgium, we saw that also the statistical and company data is one of the most consulted domains in Belgium as well. So there you can see there's a commonality. This is important because that means that the re-users see most economic value in these type of data sets. We also found that on average companies are using up to five different categories when trying to look for insights in the data. So for example, when you're looking at the air quality, you need to know the air quality in the city. You need to have data on the city, on the population, on the environment but also on the transport. Is there a very busy road in a certain area? Are there many people living in a certain area? You need to know that in order to understand why the air quality is better or worse in different parts of the city. So this is important because you need to understand where re-uses are coming from if you're on the publisher's side. We also asked what the re-users see as the main benefits of working with open data. Well, most of them see it from an innovative perspective. So they are selling their services to create innovative ways of thinking of working based on the data published by the governmental sector. But also the reduced cost and increased efficiency is often seen as one of the main benefits of using open data. Data harmonization, of course, to enhance the business model but also for reliability. Because if it's open data, then you can also tell your client, well, you can look, you can find the data yourself and that then, of course, also increases the reliability. Now this is basically my last slide because I also wanted to briefly focus on the main barriers that we see that are different between data publishers and data re-uses. This is important because, again, you need to know the other side. Otherwise you can never really understand what the re-uses are looking for. So if you haven't done a study and, for example, your own city or in the country, then there's other ways to find out what re-uses are looking for. Now most of the barriers for open data publishers, this is coming from the national level, is that most national open data portal teams are actually experiencing the same type of barriers. It's often related to finances but there's also legal barriers. But that's from the publisher side. The re-uses don't really care about that. For re-uses, it's the awareness that's the problem. They don't even know that this data is out there so you need to find a way to make people aware that this data is there. So what you see, for example, at the city level, last year we published a report on open data in cities where we also featured Ghent. And then Ghent is, of course, one of the cities in Belgium that's very active in open data and they're really using the community and also the university to make people more aware of the data that's out there and also to find out which other data needs to be published so that people can actually start re-using it. So low availability is, of course, also an issue. You cannot compare different cities if you only have data from one city and not from the other city. And then there's the format issue that you first need to clean up the data and turn it into such a format that you can actually start comparing them. Technical issues are sometimes also a problem but the legal and financial barriers are not as big for the data re-uses also because it's open data. So as a last slide, these are the latest EDP reports with the URL. So I just invite you to have a look at these different reports because they can give you lots of insights into what you can think of and you don't have to reinvent the wheel here. There's lots of very good examples from across Europe that can also be applied to Belgium and then you just have to look at how another city or another national level is doing things and, yeah, if you have the same data in Belgium or you can request that data from the data publisher, then you can also make this happen here and, well, given that Belgium is going up and up and up, yeah, I really hope that Belgium will also score quite well this year. So if you have any questions, please do let me know because I'm happy to answer whatever question you might have. Thank you. There's one question. So the good news is we catched up on the delay, so we will stop for coffee at 10.30. You have one question. It's eating out of Martin's hand. So we're going to start switching the slides so you can take one question from the front here. Sure. Thank you. You mentioned free software on the first slide. Is all the source code of the application you developed open source? Well, we haven't really developed any applications ourselves. Not as the European data portal. We monitor what's happening in Europe. Would you request that, as it's financed by public money, it should be free and open? I just add something. There is a request by the Free Software Foundation Europe that every software that is financed even partially by public money should be public. Public means free and open source. I would say it really depends on the agreements that have been made, but generally from the European data portal, that is not something that we really look at. Often you will see that the source code is actually published, but then there might be some restrictions. For example, commercial use is not allowed. So they will put restrictions in there and then you can debate whether it's really open data or not. But yeah, there are still definitely quite some differences. Do you monitor the license of the data? Because this is extremely important, especially if the data can be used in OpenStreetMap, for example. In which case it has to be OBDL? Well, what we monitor, for example, we also have a licensing assistant on the European data portal where you can see the different licenses that are being used and also what restrictions they have. But generally we do actually ask if it's open data, then it has to be completely open. But there are different countries still applied different norms and different ideas there. But generally that is the idea. And then you can check with the quality checker, the metadata quality checker on the EDP, you can also check how many licenses from a catalogue. For example, the Belgian National Open Data Portal, what the percentage is of open data, of open licenses. Thank you again.