Monday, February 10, 2014

SHARE PSI 2.0 : A new project on Open Data started


Share-PSI 2.0 is a new CIP/PSP project, bringing together a critical mass of government agencies and organisations responsible for implementing the new Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive.

Lead by the W3C, the consortium includes the Open Group and Open Geospatial Consortium as fellow standards bodies plus the PSI Alliance, Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Data Institute and PwC as the primary contractor in the ISA Programme's work on interoperability. Each of these represents a community with an interest in standards for commerce, overnment and citizen-lead activity, however, Share-PSI goes much further. 16 government agencies with direct responsibility for defining and implementing an open data strategy are included in the network, covering 14 countries. Another 21 academic bodies and SMEs with a direct role in advising and implementing the PSI Directive take the tally of countries covered to 25 plus Russia.

The network will proceed via a series of 5 workshops on different themes related to the implementation of the new PSI Directive. Partners will contribute case studies of relevant work done, successful or otherwise; each workshop will include external participants selected on the basis of submitted position papers, and will generate a standalone report. The inputs and outputs from each workshop will be aggregated into a single best practices document that, through an independent process, may become a recognised W3C standard. Importantly, this document will be localised in each of the countries covered by the network. Localisation will cover language(s) but, more importantly, it will refer to the specific implementation methods that apply in those countries. For example, how to contact a specific national or city-wide data portal, which controlled vocabularies should be used, which licence(s) is/are appropriate and so on. The result will be country-specific guidance on implementing a harmonised approach to implementation of the PSI Directive on open data across at least a majority of European countries.

University of the AEGEAN / Information Systems Laboratory, is a partner in the project, with the responsibility of organising the 1st SHARE PSI 2.0 International Workshop on Open Data, in conjunction with the 5th Samos Summit on ICT-enabled Governance.


An overview of the SHARE PSI 2.0 Network