BOSA.be

Open Data in Belgium

December 19th, 2017

Bart Hanssens – DG Digital Transformationopendata@belgium.be

Israeli Delegation

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Open data is data that

• does not contain personal data or sensitive information

• is published in a format that can be processed easily by machines

• can be used for both non-commercial and commercial purposes by

any third party

Definition

Reuse of administrative borders in open source statistical package “R”

https://github.com/bnosac/BelgiumMaps.StatBel

Benefit: easier visualization of official statistics

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Example

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Legislation and agreements

• Revised EU Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive

• Part of the Belgian Digital Agenda

Benefits

• Citizens: transparency

• Companies: innovation and economic potential

• Governments: easier re-use / sharing data across administrations

Reasons

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Open Data Task Force at federal level

• Different profiles: technical, business, legal

• Advisory + match-making roles

• Contacts with EU, regions, businesses and open data community

“Data Champions” within administrations

• Often non-technical contact points

• Preferably decision makers, good knowledge of own organization

Organization

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Portal publishing metadata + studies and general info

• Data stays on the servers of the respective administrations

• Harvesting metadata from regional and local portals

• Exported to EU data portal

• Standardized EU metadata format DCAT-AP

• Experimental “Linked Data Fragments” API

Data.gov.be

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• If data quality is not sufficient for publication, it’s not sufficient for

internal use either

• Many will use it, few will tell (similar to open source)

• Not a one-way publication flow: feedback from citizens, businesses

Lessons learned

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• http://data.gov.be

• https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/release/dcat-ap-v11

• http://linkeddatafragments.org

• https://www.openknowledge.be

Links

BOSA.be

Thank you