Digital Agenda Assembly

I attended the first day of the Digital Agenda Assembly last week. The workshop on Open Data and Re-use of Public Sector Information was my first stop. Nice to see some colleagues of the digital agenda scoreboard project back!

The DAA succeeded to bring a large group of people together, all concerned with opening (governmental) data to the wide public.

Many speakers told us that opening up data is a slow process. It requires “many” small steps to grow from a one star to a five star data publishing organization.

One of the major steps in the process is to making people more aware that opening data does not yield a danger but brings opportunities. The experience learns that one as data provider cannot imagine what kind of interesting applications others can build with your data.

The open data challenge and hack4Europe perfectly illustrate what creativity can do with your data.

Although today's major challenge lies in a change of mind (as Harry Verwayen of Europeana said in the panel), the necessary tools should be ready to ease the publication of Linked Open Data. For that projects like LOD2 are needed.