 So good afternoon. Imagine open data would be open and reusable by default. So we're not talking only about the data sets, but about a broader infrastructure on a government level, which helps to settle a publishing process, which is close to the business owners who work with the data on a daily basis. And we like to provide a method which allows to rewire the existing publishing process, which is often rewiring the data to linked data at the time of publishing. Of, as Jovgen mentioned, providing a lot of forums and fields, there are too complicated to regular users to fill out. So we would like to work towards data publishing and producing process, which has a more perceived usefulness for data stewards and which is more easy for data publishers. So at the level of Flemish government, we are already publishing about 4,000 data sets. But we noticed it's not easy for re-users, such as companies or citizens, and even the government to reuse those data sets. So why? If you start with, if you find a useful data set on the web, the processor often starts with downloading the data set, making sure you can read it, and then you have to integrate it with your own data. It's often a complicated process. So how can we make this process easier? Well, we can try to make computers to do the work for us. So this is where linked data comes to the rescue. It's all about publishing your data in a structured way on the web and use the web to link it to other data sets. And I will start with the outlining four principles of linked data. The level of Flemish government, we are already publishing data using persistent identifiers, so-called URIs, which looks kind of a URL. Those are stable Poo URIs, which identify things on the web. In this case, the address Koenigin Maria Handicaplan number 7 in Kent. We use a strategy to create cool and stable URIs. The second principle is all about making dereferensible HTTP URIs. We could use, for instance, an ISBN, which is also a stable URI for identifying books. But if you would fill out it or type it into our browser, the browser would become confused. Therefore, we use HTTP URIs and we use that method, which allows to give useful feedback. So if you type it into your browser, you get human-readable data about the object. In this case, the address. And if you are a machine, you get machine-readable data. The third principle is about providing useful data. So we align our data in line with international standards. This allows the data to be interpreted by machines because otherwise you need analysts to map the data, analyze it, and it's time-consuming and very expensive process. And the last principle is what linked data is all about. Imagine your web without links that you should memorize all web pages and you wouldn't be able to click from one hyperlink to another one while it's the same for machines. The web for machines is more useful when you have links, which provides information and which direct to other useful information. For instance, all buildings and all governmental organizations are identified by URI, which is shown on the slides. And it points to an address. And we are not copying the address, which we're linking to another URI, which provides other useful information. So we took a focus from the user, but we must make it also easy for data publishers. So avoiding rewiring the data and publishing as open data and avoiding bugging the users with filling out a lot of forms and metadata. So we searched for another way to connect the dots, which we call linked data at your fingertips. It's a way which looks like a regular word processing tools with diaper hats and without even noticing it. As a user, you are creating linked data, which allows you to publish it easily on the web, easy for re-users, but also easy for governments. So my colleague Verunik will zoom in into this process. Yes, a few years ago, we started a project on local council decisions. You might ask why we took that team to work on. Well, council decisions, it's the core business of the government agency I work for. It's our mission to make sure that the decisions councils make, that they are legal and of high quality, and that they are made for the greater good. All of us are for that. So on a daily basis, we work with local decisions. Maybe a question, how many of you know what your council decided on that's relevant for you the last month? No one? OK. Well, the truth is we neither. Or maybe not as much or not as easy as we would like. So we started the project. We know there is a lot of interesting information in local decisions. We know they have impact on day-to-day life. And we would like to make the information that's in there easy accessible, easy to find, and reusable by everyone. We doubt additional effort for the cities. That's what pops up at your fingertips. It should be easy for them to publish the data. What did we do first? The first step is to the five-star goal, we said ourselves, is to make sure that we talk about the same things. We created a standard for decisions, bas-lat, it is in Dutch, and everything about mandataris, mandate, someone who is in the council, to make sure that everyone in the community and all the machines understand what it means. We did a lot of workshops with all kinds of stakeholders, a lot of local people and local citizens, to make sure that we have a lot of discussions on how to call bas-lat. I think we can debate it on two days, what is the decision? So the result is we have a few vocabularies and application profiles, and we posted them online. And at this time, you can still look at our results and you can contribute because we still have a public review until the end of this month. I can show you also where it is, where you can find it. We have a lot of vocabularies. And the ones we focus on here is, for example, the sluts. Can you see? No, you can see. We did test it in front. It's for the video streaming. OK, oh, yes. OK, you can explore the vocabularies. OK, that's what they do. You can read about it online, and you can explore them. And for example, explore the vocabularies. And you can get an image, very fancy. This is the vocabularies on the sluts, on the decision. I'm not going to read all the terms, and it would be a bit boring. But you can read it, and you can use it, and maybe contribute on the public review. I thought this tool was cool when I first saw the flashy vocabulary open. But my business colleagues, I'm not technical, but my business colleagues think I'm technical. And they might disagree that this is cool. They will think, what can I do with that thing? What does it mean for me in real life? OK, you can see another one. I need someone to help me. OK, they want to know, what can I do in real life with this information, and with the flashy information model? Well, I can try to just talk. We are quite aware that it's very necessary that we not only show how this information model looks like, or show a lot of Sparkle queries. My colleagues are not going to learn how to make Sparkle queries. But so we are aware that we need to build user-friendly, end user-friendly tools that use the data. We saw it in the previous presentation with graphics. It's very much better for end users to see what the data means. So we are building and investing in tools, in semantic tools that use the data and that make an addition to them. So what did we do? We made an editor with templates that people can use, just people that make decisions, that prepare them before the council. They can type the decisions in an editor that provides them with links automatically. We also think it's important that we can guarantee that the data is authentic, that it's real, what the decision says. We are working on the proof of concept now to integrate with blockchain, just to link data and blockchain how they can work together. We also want to help the local councils to make them a publication on their website with widgets and a search engine to make sure that the people can really get to the information. Because you can make sure that the decisions are on the website that's not when you hide it somewhere, people still are not going to find them. And because we believe that semantic applications are the future in a world that is falsely digitalizing and to make sure that we deliver quality service also digitally, we need to get the data out of the software. So we make sure that a lot of our partners, also companies, software developers that they also want to connect with our application and that they also build semantic applications that connect to our application. I'm going to demo our editor. No, I'll just turn it off. So what we also learned during our research, people are afraid of losing words. They might sometimes not like what the board is doing with their text, but still they're used to it and they want to use it. So we made an editor that looks like a board that looks like an environment that they are used to. And we also know that people just want to type. They don't like a lot of metadata fields to fill in. They're used to using board and typing unstructured text. So we did something like that. You type Nautulum, which are the minutes of a console meeting, or you type Bessulat. And the tool just says, OK, what do you want to do? Maybe you want to make Nautulum minutes. And you just fill in, OK, I want to make minutes. And we made sure that there is a model in there, a template. Yes, thank you. A template. And there are some of the words. Can you see it? We made sure that a few words are already lit. And you can see that the vocabulary I showed you in the application that this is the name of, OK, is the start date of this session. And also that you can type here the people who are present there that have a mandate. And you can type Tom, for instance, and he instantly shows you these people. Not sure why this is shown. OK, that's fine. He instantly says, oh, we have a few terms in the Council of Neil. And he shows, OK, which one do you want to include? And you just say, OK, include. And you already see this is Tom de Vries, and he is present at this meeting. So it's really easy for them. I picture that there are some pictures of these people next to the, so they cannot make a mistake. So you can add these people that have a mandate. But you can also maybe include a decision. In Flanders, it is obligated to include the decisions in full in the minutes of the meeting. So it's really good that the rules say that because we can say you make the minutes and you include the decisions. You type besluts and we have some templates here which says maybe someone wants to, a new mandate is being held. Someone new should be in the Council. Someone has... Elected. Yeah, no, I was dismissed. I'm not sure how many I should... Someone resigned, thank you. Someone resigned. So you have to take note of it, and you can take a decision on it. Or you just say I have a general decision, I'm not sure about what, and you include it. We also made sure that you can include the higher grounds, the higher laws that they have to refer to. And we made the decree, it is the most important law that the local government should cite. I'm not sure why he opens this. Time. So we made the... We made it also linked, so we can cite here the articles in the decree. This is also an example of how we can make it easy for the end users to use the links and the linked data. You made the decree and you just select you made the decree. And now we are sure that when this decision is made and we can maybe search as plan was, give me every decision that is made in accordance with the committee to create, then we can find it. So that is why we do this. Okay. Yes, so are you okay? Yes, it's okay. Thank you. We worked for half an hour to make it right, but it's still difficult. I already told you about the tools we were making. And I showed you our editor. We want to make sure that everything we make, our software, but also our data, of course, are reusable by all stakeholders. Government of all levels, Flemish, federal, the local councils, but also the citizens and the businesses. We think that this tooling and this technique and this method has benefits for everyone. Of course, for us, it is very important that we as supervising governments are informed. Of course, we want to know what's happening with our cities. But also that there is a better integration with the website of the local councils. It is increasingly an important medium for cities to talk with their citizens, to get in touch with them and to inform them. And if you want to know something about what is decided in your council, you have to screen all the PDFs that are on the website if you find them. And then you have to open them one by one and read them. That's the only way of really finding a particular decision. With this tooling and with this method, it should be easier because the decisions are published as HTML. This also means that there is a better integration with search engines. We all Google, I think. When we want to find information, everyone goes to Google and searches. When we use this technology, we can make sure that, for example, for opening hours, it's easy to find on Google. But we would like to do the same thing for information that is in local decisions. When there's a road closed because of an event, it should be easy to find. I recently had to railroad my way to a road block because I didn't know. And I had to get my children on time in school and it was not easy. Also the prices of accommodations when they change, they should be easy to find on the Internet. Maybe another benefit and maybe also a very important one is that the authentic information that could be available like this that we can collect them and share them in virus information sources automatically. What special information source are the base registries? Those are registries which contain master data of governments, which contain the car information which is used in various public services such as addresses, buildings, roads, public services. And what is special about those registries is that each object can be identified by a URI, a unique cool identifier and they act as one system. So all registries they point to each other which makes it easy to integrate them into applications of citizens, companies and governments. Now we have managed and we are working to create a central register which is a linked register on local council decisions. And this is what Veronica pointed out to. We are not going to type over the information for the registry but we are going to use the information in the local decisions to harvest the data using principles of linked data and to fill the registry. So this means we are going to have one registry which finds great information about local decisions which creates a more transparent society. And the information can also be reused in other base registries. For instance, we have seen the example of the mandates. Well, the mandates database, the new one for the new elections won't be a database which is maintained manually but the information can be harvested from local decisions which are in such a form in the base registry for the decisions and which can be used to maintain a council database. Now, I would like to give you an example of an initiative of a citizen, he is there in the room, Nick Bartolomews who created a platform which gives you an insight in the web of connections between companies individuals and politicians in Belgium. This is information which comes from the database of mandates but it also uses for instance the base registry for addresses to do data cleaning. So in this example Thank you. So you can try it when you have to open the box.bd and then you can for instance look for a company and the system is searching for connections towards companies, individuals, politicians and this is one example of citizens that reuse information including mandates which creates more transparency and even data is cleaned using linked data for instance the addresses are cleaned using the base registry and you can see that the information click the link of the address with the human readable data which clicks the symbol of the document then you can see it is connected to the base registry of addresses. These methods allow because of the data set contains information to all the data sets to integrate it with other useful information. So to conclude some pointers, all the information of the research of this project is originally of restriction so all metrics and all research materials can be found using the first hyperlink. All standards were built in co-creation with academia companies and governments they can be found at data.flounder.be all data is open so you can find the data on the base registry for instance of addresses and organizations via those links the source codes of our software tool can be found on our github and our open data is accompanied with an open license which is the reference by a cool URI. So this presentation will be published later on. And also we are open for collaboration so if you want you can get in touch either on base registry and you can contact our colleague Siri or Oslo which is Raf himself or project or local decisions and you can contact me or my colleague Catherine.