The Your Data Stories project, funded by the EU, aims to enhance transparency in governance by piloting ICT-based tools utilizing open data over a 36-month period starting February 1, 2015. It includes three key pilots focusing on public financial tracking in Greece, development aid in the Netherlands, and cross-European financial comparisons. The project addresses challenges in economic open data, such as heterogeneity and compatibility, while highlighting the need for improved tools and infrastructure.

1. From Data to
Your Data Stories
Anna
Triantafillou,
ATC
Vangelis
Karkaletsis,
NCSR
‘Demokritos’
Big
Data
Europe
Workshop,
Luxemburg
18/11/2015

2. YourDataStories at a Glance
• An EU Funded Project
– INSO-1-2014: ICT-Enabled open government
• Starting Date: February 1st, 2015
• Duration: 36 months
• Scope: Innovation Action
– Pilots on transparency
• Highlights
– Actions should pilot tools to increase the transparency
impact of ICT-based technology platforms of the public
sector;
– The transparency tools to be piloted should benefit
from open data and help in monitoring, enhancing
accountability & fighting corruption

3. Pilot 1: Follow public money all the way in Greece
• Comprehensive analysis of available
data
– RDFise and interconnect data from various
(governmental) sources
• National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF),
Greek Transparency Portal (Diavgeia), etc.
– Enhance data along various dimensions
• Detailed geo-information, ground named-
entities, etc.
– Provide the Data Citizen, public servants,
auditors with tools to query, discover and
participate in the fiscal transparency
process

4. Pilot 2: Tracking Development Aid in the Netherlands
• Analysis of data across multiple
countries
– RDFise and interconnect data from
various sources
• Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DGIS),
International AID Transparency Initiative
(IATI), MIT’s Atlas, etc.
– Provide journalists with tools to
discover ‘news’ stories
• Answering “interesting questions”
– How much did the Netherlands spend on
foreign aid related to Zimbabwe in the time
frame 2005-2014, what sectors was this
money spent on and in relation to what?

5. Pilot 3: Cross-Europe Financial Comparability
• Comparative analysis of data across EU
– Exploit our unifying model, vocabulary, and tools
to enable comparisons of economic data across
EU
• The results from the Greek ‘Follow Public Money all
the way’ pilot will be compared with data from the
Irish National and Local Government

6. Challenges
• Economic open data are:
– Heterogeneous
– Incompatible vocabularies
– Not related to policy goals
• With great potential!
– We need tools and
infrastructure to alleviate
these problems

7. http://www.yourdatastories.eu