copyright by Raimondo Iemma, Federico Morando, Michele Osella at CeDEM14

1. Breaking public administrations’ data silos:
The case of Open-DAI, and a comparison
between open data platforms.
Raimondo Iemma, Federico Morando, Michele Osella
CeDEM14
Krems, 21st May 2014

2. CeDEM - 21st May 2014 Raimondo Iemma – Open Data platforms comparison 2
Govs are not open by design
● Open government data is a powerful tool for eGovernment:
✔ internal interoperability;
✔ engagement of external innovators.
● However, data disclosure is not natively embedded in the typical
information life-cycle of public bodies:
✗ access from external users is limited;
✗ information flows (if any) are vertical, and not horizontal.
● Open data platforms:
● operate as 'buses' between data centers and the outside world;
● still, data publication entails a good share of manual work (e.g., taking
decisions).

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Objectives
● Isolating requirements for state-of-the-art OD platforms.
● Discuss whether and how four existing platforms comply with such
requirements.
● Set further steps to enrich/customize our benchmarking.
Lesson learned: if customers feel too much 'tracked', they will run
away.Thus, data controllers make this perception less tangible.

4. CeDEM - 21st May 2014 Raimondo Iemma – Open Data platforms comparison 4
Requirements for OD portals / 1
● Source: 20 widely diffused policy documents:
➔ European Legislation (e.g., PSI Directive, INSPIRE);
➔ National / local legislation (e.g., ITA Code for Digital Administration);
➔ EU Digital Agenda-related plans (e.g., eGOV action plan);
➔ Technical guidelines (e.g., UK Open Standard Principles);
➔ Tender specifications (e.g., EU Open Data portals);
➔ Independent studies.
● Refinement in two steps
1) Eliciting a long-list of preliminary requirements drawing on
aforementioned sources.
2) Distilling the short-list of refined requirements.

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Requirements for OD portals / 2

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Requirements for OD portals / 3

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Open Data portals
● Open-DAI: EU-funded open-source platform designed to expose
data as services, directly pulling from legacy databases of the data
holder.
● Socrata Open Data portal: commercial cloud-based service for
data publishing, metadata management, data catalogue federation, and
exposure of data as services.
● CKAN (acronym for Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network):
an open-source data management platform maintained by the Open
Knowledge Foundation.
● ENGAGE: EU FP7-funded data infrastructure supporting scientific
collaboration and research.

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Benchmarking results
● Synoptic table: in the article; and in .csv here:
https://github.com/seralf/checklist-piattaforme-opendata
● Publication features: direct link with legacy databases is a plus for
Open-DAI, particularly suitable for frequently changing data.
However, Socrata has strong browsing features, and CKAN is more
interoperable (e.g., performs quality check through OpenRefine)
● Data features: OK Linked Open Data by the two EU-backed
projects.
● Architecture: complete options by Open-DAI;
● Add-ons: 'ticketing' systems by ENGAGE, tracking bugs and
encouraging derived datasets.
● In general: CKAN and Socrata have less sustainability problems
(already widely used).

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Next steps
● We would like to enrich both the variety of requirements, and the
mapped Open Data platforms.
● A first step: a (semantic) wiki, linking requirements with original
documents (in Alpha, hosted at http://opendataportals.referata.com/)
● In fact, a public administration might want to customize the set of
requirements for its own specific purposes / constraints, in order to
select the best solution.

11. CeDEM - 21st May 2014 Raimondo Iemma – Open Data platforms comparison 11
Example (query)
==Interim results: which platform meets which high level
requirements?==
{{#ask: [[Category:HighLevelRequirement]]
| mainlabel=Requirement
| ?hasType
| ?isMetBy
| ?isPartiallyMetBy
| ?-hasClassification
}}

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Example (query)

13. Thanks! (Joint future developments welcome!)
This paper was drafted in the context of the Open-DAI ICT-PSP project (GA n°297362). The authors
acknowledge the support of the European Commission and are grateful to the project members for their
support.
Raimondo Iemma
raimondo.iemma@polito.it