 For this session, I think since 2015, I think we already spoke to you about LBLOD, localization of data, and last year, we spoke about, of course, since this is open Belgium, the importance of open data, and how we work together with the community to make sure we have relevant solutions for citizens. And I'm not sure if you remember, because it was the last event, I think, before we went into lockdown. And we noticed how important our project was, because all of a sudden, a lot of decisions were made that we haven't heard of before, like having to wear a face mask, was all of a sudden the new normal, curfews, and even maximum amounts of people that can be in a certain area, a whole wide world of new kinds of decisions that we needed to know about. Of course, other governments needed to know what was decided, but also we, as a civilian, we wanted to know, and companies also needed to know what the new rules were. And the question always is, can I access the information? How can I make sure that I as a citizen or my fellow citizens know what to do? Can we create a solution that makes sure that everyone knows the rules? And since we have a project that builds an ecosystem based on standards and linked open data, we can say yes, yes we can, yes you can. We even have a deadline this year, by June 2021, so this year, local authorities will publish all of their decisions as linked open data. It will make data sharing easier, as you all know, and a lot of local governments already have started, so that means that they are making their decisions available based on the linked open data standard. They even have to publish it as linked open data, it's a rule. And they have a lot of solutions to do so, so we are helping them with a lot editor, so an LOD editor, a text editor. I think you lost addition, you could even have a go at it and try to create your own text editor and your own decisions in it. We have a few software vendors that already embed our editor in their tool, and there are also a few local software suppliers that embedded the linked open data standard in their publishing module, so that local governments can publish their decisions. The last year we spent a lot of time on infosessions, testing, support, giving them feedback, even giving them money to make sure that everyone is on board. And it pays off, so we already have 56% of all the local governments that publish their decisions as linked open data, and it's an increase of more than 26% since last summer. So it may cost us a lot of patience and effort, but we see it works. And what does it mean? Is that all of the information on local decisions like agendas, decisions themselves, the meeting minutes, that they are available on the local website, so we already did a test on Google if you look for local decisions. It is easier nowadays to find the local decisions. So if you want to look for something of your local government, you'll probably find it on the local website also. But we also, as a Flemish government, we also harvest the information and put it in our own data hive. Katrin will show you later how it looks like. Of course, you can also look for the mandates and the landing given of the local governments. It's also a database you can search for. What we also do is simplify the communication between governments and higher authorities like Flanders. It is kind of difficult for Flanders to look at all of the 300 local governments and know what to decide upon, especially with COVID, knowing what the rules were, not only citizens, but also as Flanders to make sure that every decision is not only legal, but is in sync with each other. That wasn't easy. So we could fall back on a database we already had to make sure we have insights in what is going on at the local level. So we have a besloyter database of local decisions where you could full-text search actually what was decided upon at the local level. So for example, when we looked for face mask, I can even show you if you want. I could show you, I can't show you because or okay, I can't show you because our network is done at Flanders. So I will show you maybe later on. Can you again see this presentation? Sorry. So if you look for face mask in our decision database, you could find I think almost 2000 decisions on Montmasker. So that means that Flanders can look at all of these decisions and make sure that they're legal and in sync with higher legislation, for example. We make sure that we share this information with other departments in Flanders so that local governments don't have to copy the information to other departments over and over again. So we want to make sure that citizens can be informed and can be involved in a better way. We have a goal by 23. We want to make sure that there are tools so we can do so by sharing the data we have and working together with all of you with the community. This is our minister, Barth Thomas. He also believes that the project we have here helps in involving citizens in the local decision making and he already answered in the Flemish parliament on questions about citizen involvement. So he mentioned that he really would like 2023 to be the moment we have better solutions to make sure that we can involve citizens. When we are doing a project, we have an agile way to make sure that we have the right solution. We identify the problem. We research a lot of possibilities. How can we tackle this problem? We build a project and then we test. The assumptions we made earlier and we are trying to learn from doing and testing our products and what we built. That is where we are now. So we are asking you, the community, to test what we made and we are asking you to influence the future. I explained that we want to involve and inform the citizens and we want you to challenge us. We want you to take the data we have and do something with it so that local governments can be motivated to be even more transparent. It is important for them to see that people are interested in the data, in the local decisions. So they know that the change they have to make in order to publish the data as linked open data. It has value. We also want you to inspire the policymakers to invest in open data and especially in linked open data. So if you have any idea on how to use the data on decisions, what would you do and what data would you want? We want to challenge you to pitch an idea, a concept design, maybe even a working application in three weeks. So we made a prototype. Katrin will show you. And we want you to play with the data and make sure you have some kind of idea. Katrin will now show you what data we have right now. We usually have more general information on meeting agendas, decisions and those who make the decisions. Now we put it in a decision data hive that Katrin will show you know how to use it. Okay, I will take over the screen. Good morning all. Before we start with the exploration of the data decision hive, I will still repeat what we have in it. Veronica mentioned it already. We have data about mandates. They are coming out from the Mandatan data bank. We have data about management functions. This is coming from the leading here in the data bank. Those two data sets are mostly complete. We have it from all municipalities and then the data we are today presenting to you about the decisions we have on this moment from five municipalities because we are still trying to help them to do it good because you have to know they are already obliged to do it from January 2019 but they are in a way to start and it takes some time. Municipality of Leverheim, for example, they have started in October to publish their first not to learn as linked open data. How can you see that? I will go back a step. Here you have the city council and on the bottom they have three documents that are published as linked open data, an agenda, a list with decisions and the meeting minutes. The meeting minutes are the most extensive documents. I will open it. There you have who is attending to the meeting. You have the items on the agenda and what is decided. You have the decision itself that is completed in the lists. You have only the items and the decision that is made about it, not the whole text and agenda. It is only the agenda items with sometimes a description. Meeting like this, they are having once a month and mostly not in December or not in February, so from October till now, we have only four documents already, not the meeting minutes of the last one who was held in February because they are published end of March after the next meeting. So just to explain how the process is working, it takes some time to have the complete meeting minutes. What's interesting before you start to explore and that decision that I have is to watch the data model that will help you to know what you can find, which items you can use to write the queries. You can use the entities relationships, but I'm not technical and I learned by doing so I will explore together with you the data. So here we have a first query. We are going to look how many meetings are in this decision data hive. So I used here a query I was asking for Besleut sitting what is having this type. So I have on this moment 23 meetings in the Sparkle endpoint, which means that for the agenda and a list of decisions and the meeting minutes they are all put together in one meeting. So for one meeting you can find three types of information. Let's go step further. Who are the boards who are holding the meeting? That's something else you can do. Then I asked for the URI, so I received the URI. And here you have the 23 meetings with their meeting boards and I can explore it further. When I click on it I can see from here it's the College of Danza that has made some decisions here. There are other ways to ask information. So perhaps it's more interesting to explore something where we have several meeting minutes. So I want to know which board has more than one meeting or how many meetings have each board we are having in the data set. So I receive here the answer. The most are having one in it for the moment. I have here a board with four meeting minutes. Let's explore this further. I can choose to copy the link here and then go for another query. It was already prepared so I will do it here. I have four meeting minutes. Just shortly to show how you can search in it. Let's go further and look at the data itself. You saw the website of Leverheim. Normally seen it's a meeting minute of Leverheim I have here opened and you see it here on the URI. For this municipality there is a difference between the URI and the URL they use. The URI is not dereferensible on this moment. When I click on the URI you will have an error message. This is also a tragic, a tragic we are working to and they are going step by step in one of the following new versions of their software. It will be dereferensible. There are already software houses who can make the URI dereferensible. Although we have a lot of information already from this meeting minutes. I go to the bottom because there we have general information. You can find here the date of the meeting. It was the 27th of January when it started at 8 o'clock, started at time 8 o'clock ended at 9 o'clock. The location and this time is now mostly a digital meeting before you found their council room or something like that. Sometimes now it's also a cultural center where they are meeting. What can you find? Also the meeting has a president and I see the URI of the president. When I click on it I will do it in another screen or another tab. You have the information about the president. He started at the 2nd of January in 2019 and he holds mandates. He has memberships and that's about the fraction. You can find there but we want to know who the person is. Then I can go here to Bestürlöke Alias van. Then I get to know the person and it's here going about Nikola Spinal. This data we are getting from the Mandaten data bank. The link was used here. You can find it also in the Mandaten data bank. Let's go back to our meeting minutes. What we have also. We have the Amwezig Bestart. Those are the persons who are from the beginning at the meeting. It works the same way. You can also find the mandates. Here you see the board who is holding a meeting. I showed it before for Denze. Here you can see it's the Gemeente Raad van Lievegem. Also the posts who are forming the boards. Can you find in here? Let's go further. I will scroll to the top again. Here you see all the attendees. Then here we start with the agenda items. I will pick one. Let's try this one. Then you can see what information we have about an agenda item. Okay. My internet is hanging. I will try it again. It was working this morning. Always risky to have a live dinner. Yes. Pick another one. Yes. Here I have it. It was a little slow. About the agenda item. I'm not kidding you. Here it's about an agenda point. I can go to the subject of the agenda. And then you see who is the attendee at the agenda item. Because someone can leave or can start later at a meeting or in some cases he may not be attending the discussion on an agenda item. Because he's involved in the agenda discussion. Okay. So the attendees we have here. When we go further we have again the foresitter. Interesting here is you can see how people have voted on the agenda point. Let's open this. We will stay in the same tab. Okay. I missed. No problem when I go back. So when you take this one you are coming to the definition of what is heath stemming. To see the data you take the one at the right column. So what you know what's about what's to find about the voting. You can see who has voted. So it's a forestander. The item are who is. There were only people who are saying yes we are going to do that. It's still loading here. I don't think there were the heath standards. It's a big. Now I have no the heath standards here. I will wait until he has loaded the other page. So because he's also counting how many people have voted. Yes. How many people were against it. So you can see what's the amount. It's a public stemming. And it's because the voting is public. You can know how every Chancellor has voted. There are also votings who are secret as we know it. And then you do not know how every person has voted. There are no heath standards here. Everyone was had said yes. So we see here 24 standards. There were 29 persons in the council room. We do not know yet on what they have voted. So we are going back because we want to know what were they voting about. And then normally it's this one where I can see what they have discussed. It was in Besleut von der Koleise. Here you can see also what's the content of the decision and what's the motivation to take the decision. It's a long motivation. For this moment you find the decision in one text block software houses or the tools that are already further in the data model. They are of they can split up from article on from this on this moment. We do not have yet someone who is splitting up in articles because it takes some time to to have changes to the software tools. Well, this is what I wanted to show you what we have in our data hive. I will not go too far in it so you can explore it by yourself. On our website you have other kind of queries. So I say let's explore and try to do some things. We are going to add some more documents and there are municipalities who are starting in a few days. So by the end of the week you will find a little more data available. So I give back the word to Vironiki. Thank you, Katrin. I'm not sure. I'm not sharing my screen. Thank you for explaining our decision data hive. I tried to show you our database of decisions earlier and managed to get in there. So I can show you how we could search for Montmask. For example, I will first tell you we have more than 86,000 documents in our database. If I go for Montmask, you will show us that there are 1,484 decisions on Montmask. And like Katrin showed us, you can click on them and look for linked decisions on there like this. We go to the website of the local government and then we can see that there was a decision by the mayor when and where to wear a Montmask. If we then go to the future what we would like to have is solutions where we can not only look for the tech for Montmasks, but that you also can see a list of places where you have to wear the Montmask. Like these are the streets in the center of a city, for example, where we have to wear it. It's like that almost everywhere I think. And that you can click on the streets and see what was decided upon that street earlier where Montmask was mentioned in the decision. And even what we would like is some kind of link to measurements on how busy it is. So you can have some kind of alert that sometimes the rule says you have to wear a Montmask when it's busy. So it would be nice that you also get some kind of alert on that. So that is what we envision in the future. In making tools possible where we can integrate the information on decisions in applications that are close to citizens. So I would invite you to explore our data and dream with us. We will launch your websites on the challenge. I think in a few. Arthur, I should mention. He is already available. He is already available. So you just go to open Belgium. 2021. Yes, click on that and see what the challenge is all about. Let's go. What would you do with it? That's our challenge for you. And I think that was our talk. We are open for questions. I already saw some questions. You can find a small summary in the shared notes. Yes. I did see someone asking about vegan roads. It's difficult to say these things in looking for the notes. Yes. So I do remember correctly. Local governments have to have some register on defining new roads and adaptions to the roads. And they also have to send it to the central database. We are working on that actually. That was maybe the question. We are doing this in steps, like we do with all other things we try to implement. I could maybe show you how it is now mentioned in our registry or database of decisions. Because we are working with MOE on this subject. Where local governments can publish their decisions on the roads as link data and we can harvest them automatically. That doesn't mean that we already can have a lot on his segment. But that would be the future actually. So the first step is making sure that we know about the decisions and that it doesn't cost a lot of effort for the local governments. I was going to show you that we already have them in our database. I was trying to lost my mouse thing. Too many screens before me. Here it is. So we have, for example, the tool from Willebroek. Like this. It's still in a non-linked way. So we still have a PDF, but you can see that we are finding the decisions on roads. If I go for Hoylan, we can see that we can find the decision on the Hoylan next to the roads. But the idea is that we can have lots in the decisions later on so that we also can have the information on the actual his wegsegment. I'm not sure how to put that in English. So I'll just have to go for the Dutch word. Is that an answer to the question? Okay. Are there still some other questions I need to address? I assume that given that there's at least some action on the server that some people are thinking of various solutions, either feel free to bring them up or maybe we should kind of indicate what the broadness of the solutions are that would be interesting for the challenge. Right? Yes, because what we want to test whether or not our solution for giving you the data is okay. And in general, whether or not we can use this way of working in order to involve citizens more in the future. So it's kind of different levels. We are trying to get feedback on how to move forward. So that means that anything with respect to the challenge like this data is useful. And I would like to extend it with the following data. It would be nice if we'd have that or based on this, I could build an application or I've tried with it. I built a few queries and I now have the following information and it's interesting. Anything that has to do with the data or extending this data what you can do with it is super useful and very, very, very welcome. And then we'll figure out how we get the best information out of that or the quote unquote best ideas but that's mega weird of course. So anything in that regard, either now or later, we'd love to hear from it. We'd love to hear about it and from you. Right. And I think on that page, you'll find a place to join the challenge, how to contact us, if you have any questions, how to reach us, if you've brought down the Sparkle endpoint, how to make sure that we bring it back up. So feel free to ask silly questions to it. It's all fine. We have a few questions. Is a party affiliation also available on the members of the city council, for example? Yes, it is. Normally, you can find it via the relationship litmatschab. I was looking it up. I will post it in the chat. It's not always the same of the party because the fraction can be going together from several parties. So it's not completely the same. You could see it on which list someone is elected. Since locally, there are a lot of local lists that are not having a national party behind them. We sometimes have really exotic names of local level. But you can know on which list someone is being. If the municipalities have filled it and we asked for it, but not all of them are doing it, but you are going to find a lot of it. I try to find a link and I will post an example. Yes. And then Jean is asking, what technology do you use to build the user interface? Yeah, I'm also typing it. I think the most interesting is that you can actually query either a Sparkle endpoint or any backend services using a restful endpoint and it will yield you back JSON. So you can send out Sparkle queries and you get back JSON. So what we use, we use semantic works to have some microservices that yield us some basic information about the triples and that lists us the human readable names of these triples. But I suppose if the more interesting thing is that you can send Sparkle queries directly as JSON, if it should be that you hit course errors, then we can just enable it so you can use it directly on the same endpoints. So you can use that Sparkle endpoint. Do make sure that you can configure it somewhere in your application maybe because it might be that, so this database, you can bring it down, it's all fine for open Belgium. But there's other databases that we intend to have live for a longer period of time. If you can then replace it, then you can keep your app up and running because technically speaking, these APIs, the semantic model is fixed. So that should stay running for years. Was that the answer, John? John, you can use your microphone now if you like. And if you'd like to discuss further, feel free to contact and either chat or mail or meeting. You can see that some of you are already are posting some ideas. Very good. Does everyone understand what they have to do to participate in the challenge? That may also be something that maybe we should repeat it. I'm not sure whether or not it's on here. How to propose your idea. You can find it on the website. You have to send in your proposal at the latest on the 22nd of March in an extended elevator pitch. And SEP is already going wild on it. Any more questions? That either means people are typing very, very rapidly or we'll receive further questions, maybe over email or ideas or that I see some vibe in the chat, which is encouraging. And some ideas, I mean, with actual things that you already can see, that's super bad. Thank you, SEP. I think we can conclude on time. This was the first session. I hope you have a blast in searching for ideas, sending us your pitches. Thank you very much, Fironik and Katrin as well. I will quickly copy paste the shared notes into the public chat so they are also saved on the recording because that's not the case if they are in the shared notes. So you will see a lot of text there. Yes. And if there are no further questions, then I think we can conclude this call. I will stop recording in any case.