Action COST TU1204 - WG2 meeting, Madrid, 2013-12-16

1. Strategies for smart city
knowledge platform and open data
Lorena (BĂTĂGAN) POCATILU, PhD.
Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania
lorena.batagan@ie.ase.ro

2. Knowledge platform
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Knowledge platform in data rich world is an important
step for development.
Knowledge platform offers :
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access to a new information;
open data;
connecting the users;
internal and external collaboration;
innovation .

3. Friendly cities and knowledge platform
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The majority of us live in cities now, and the global
percentage is growing fast.
In fact, it is estimated that one million people move into
the world’s cities each week.
In this case we’ll need to find new ways to manage
information and knowledge like knowledge platform, to
increase efficiency, to reduce expenses and to improve
quality of life.
It is evident that our cities need to be smarter or friendly
cities.

4. Friendly cities and knowledge platform
Collaboration
Transparency
Participation
of users
Innovation
Knowledge
platform

5. Friendly cities and knowledge platform
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Information is a most important resource. It is a so-called
"public good": consumption of information by one
individual does not reduce the availability of the
information for others.
This is why the benefit of information can extend far
beyond its initial purpose.
In this case the knowledge platform must to integrate
open data.
In the last years the trend is to use open data for mange
data of the core system of cities.

6. Implementation of open data
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Implementing an open data strategy is not a simple task.
In addition to investing in the technology and operations
of open data sites, there are often barriers [3] to
successful implementation, such as:
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cultures opposed to openness;
data quality problems;
and difficulties in developing appropriate models for charging for
open data .

7. Open data instruments
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The instruments applied by countries to implement open
data policy can divided into four types:
a)
b)
c)
d)
education and training (Knowledge platforms, conference,
sessions, workshops),
voluntary approaches (Overall strategies and programmers,
General recommendations, Public voluntary schemes),
economic instruments (Competitions,Financing of open data
portals),
legislation and control (Public sector information law, Technical
standards, Monitoring).

8. 
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Effects of open data and knowledge portal
Smart cities
Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely
available to everyone or friendly to use and republish as
they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or
other mechanisms of control.
Open data offers the new possibilities to analyze and
visualize data from different sources.
Intelligent processing of data is essential for addressing
societal challenges.
Data can for example be used to enhance the
sustainability of national health care systems – essential
in a smart city.

9. Effects of open data
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Data management is also essential for environmental
challenges.
Examples are the processing of energy consumption
patterns to improve energy efficiency or of pollution data
in traffic management.
Informed policy decisions in the areas of transport, land
use and climate change depend increasingly on analysis
of the available data.

10. Effects of open data
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Scientific activities are increasingly undertaken through
global collaboration on the internet, using very large data
collections, huge computing resources and highperformance visualization.
Open data solutions are essential for meeting the
challenges of the 21st century in scientific discovery and
learning.

11. Effects of open data
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Public data are produced at all levels of government.
The conditions under which the data are made available
for commercial or non-commercial re-use have an effect
on competition and competitiveness [7].

12. Support for open data solutions
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The European Commission has supported open data
through its funding programmes:
Linked Open Data (http://lod2.eu/);
OpenAIRE (http://www.openaire.eu/);
ISA
Action
on
semantic
interoperability
(http://www.semic.eu/).

13. Initiative for open data
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Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) [8] from
Microsoft is a cloud-based collection of open government
software assets that enables publicly available
government data to be easily accessible.
Using open standards and application programming
interfaces (API), developers and government agencies
can retrieve the data programmatically for use in new
and innovative online applications.

14. Initiative for open data
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That solution can [8]:
 Encourage citizens and communities to participate with
governments;
 Enhance collaboration between government agencies and
private organizations;
 Increase government transparency;
 Provide unique insight into data trends and analysis.

15. Initiative for open data
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OGDI promotes the use of this data by capturing and
publishing re-usable software assets, patterns, and
practices.
The data repository already holds over 60 different
government datasets that are readily available for use in
new applications, and is continuously updated with
additional government datasets.

16. Initiative for open data
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OGDI data is hosted in Windows Azure.
It is accessible through open, standards-based web
services from a variety of development environments,
including Microsoft .NET, JavaScript, Adobe Flash, PHP,
Ruby, Python, and others.

17. Initiative for open data
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IBM initiative is based on Real Web 2.0 Linking Open
Data (LOD) [2] , a community initiative for moving the
Web from the idea of separated documents to a wide
information space of data.
The key principles of LOD are that it is simple, readily
adaptable by Web developers, and complements many
other popular Web trends.
Learn how to make your data more widely used by
making its components easier to discover, more
valuable, and easier for people to reuse—in ways you
might not anticipate [2].

18. Initiative for open data
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The IBM team in Helsinki was asked to help the City
develop strategies for [3]:
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creating visualizations that can enable citizens make use of and
benefit from open data,
and define the components necessary to grow a sustainable,
repeatable platform, process and ecosystem to leverage the
principles of open data, turning data into information, information
into action, and action into change [3].

19. Initiative for open data
Data
Information
Action
Change

20. Initiative for open data
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Key recommendations of IBM team [3] included:
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expanding support for the open data community, managing and
measuring the balance between engagement models;
designing feedback mechanisms to support the evolution of the
open data ecosystem;
creating a social visualization web site, platform and API;
continuing to evolve the role of Helsinki Region Infoshare;
and seeking opportunities to use open data to drive internal
change.

21. Conclusions
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‘’Cities generate a lot of useful data” [4] says Tuomo
Haukkovaara, General Manager of IBM Finland , and
all the city must work actively to make such data
open.

22. Conclusions
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Moreover, the European Council stated in the Visby
Declaration (Presidency of the European Council, 2009)
that European Union (EU) member states should seek
to make data freely accessible in open machine readable formats and stimulate the reuse of public
sector information using open data.

23. Conclusions
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Accordingly, the European Commission and the EU
member states committed themselves in the European
eGovernment Action Plan 2011-2015 to “maximising
the value of re-use of public sector information (PSI),
by making raw data and documents available for re-use
in a wide variety of formats (including machine-readable
ones) and languages and by setting up PSI portals”
(European Commission, 2010).

24. Conclusions
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Harry van Dorenmalen, Chairman of IBM Europe,
elaborates a report on how smart cities harness the
power of open data and mass collaboration to engage
citizens and solve city issues. By making the data
openly available – as so-called “open data” – new
business applications will evolve, providing services
that are derived from this public sector information [1].

25. Conclusions
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All data that can be shared with the public should be
opened for public dissemination.
Data should be published in compliance with applicable
laws and regulations, and only after addressing issues of
security and privacy.

26. References
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[1]You are hereHome Harry van Dorenmalen on Open Data for Smart Cities / PICNIC Festival 2011
http://www.engagetv.com/webcast_Harry-van-Dorenmalen-Open-Data-Smart-Cities-PICNIC-Festival2011
[2] Real Web 2.0: Linking open dataDiscover the community that sees Web 2.0 as a way to revolutionize
information on the Web http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-realweb5/
[3]Smarter Cities Challenge Helsinki Finlanda http://smartercitieschallenge.org/city_helsinki_finland.html
[4] Recommendations of the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge Programme completed
http://www.hel.fi/hki/Taske/en/news/report_of_exploitation_of_open_data_in_the_city_of_helsinki_is_pub
lished
[5] Open Data is Civic Capital:Best Practices for “Open Government Data”
http://razor.occams.info/pubdocs/opendataciviccapital.html
[6] Noor Huijboom, Tijs Van den Broek, Open data: an international comparison of strategies, European
Journal of ePractice, Nº 12 · March/April 2011 · ISSN: 1988-625X, www.epracticejournal.eu
[7] EUROPEAN COMMISSION Open data An engine for innovation, growth and transparent governance,
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/psi/docs/pdfs/directive_proposal/2012/open_data.pdf
[8] What is the Open Government Data Initiative?
http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/opengovdata/default.aspx

27.  Thank
you!