A good session with a delegation from Moldova, visiting Geonovum. We discussed standardisation in cadastral and utility network data, and how the process of creating standards from consensus over large stakeholder networks works. I presented about the implementation of the EU data strategy and corresponding EU (sectoral) data space(s). Also discussed the changes that entails for Geonovum as a national level geo-information standards body as part of the standards work is shifting to the European level.
In 2012 I did some work in Moldova, with the e-governance agency, and facilitating at the Apps4Moldova competition. Since then I’ve encountered the Moldovan e-gov team at various other locations I worked at for the World Bank.
Sinds 4 jaren ben ik met veel plezier voorzitter van de Open State Foundation. In 2008 organiseerde ik samen met James Burke en Peter Robinett de eerste bijeenkomst waaruit op termijn de OSF is voortgekomen. Sinds 2017 ben ik weer nauw betrokken bij OSF, sinds 2018 als bestuurslid.
We zoeken voor de Open State Foundation naar twee nieuwe bestuursleden. Omdat we het huidige vijftal naar zeven willen uitbreiden, en omdat we gericht op zoek zijn naar mensen die de rol van penningmeester of secretaris willen vervullen. Open State Foundation is een ANBI, en alle financiële en bestuurlijke verslagen zijn openbaar. We zoeken uiteraard in ons eigen netwerk, maar je weet nooit wie je daarmee over het hoofd ziet. Vandaar dat we ook open aanmeldingen verwelkomen.
Het bestuur van Open State Foundation bestaat uit mensen die een transparante overheid een warm hart toedragen, willen meedenken over de strategie van de stichting en hun kennis en netwerk willen inzetten om de missie werkelijkheid te laten worden. We zijn vooral een toezichthoudend bestuur, en zijn betrokken bij de missie en strategie van de organisatie. We staan dus op afstand van het dagelijkse werk dat door een mooi team onder leiding van onze directeur wordt uitgevoerd. Bestuursfuncties zijn onbezoldigd.
Meer weten? Lees de vacature op de website van OSF.
Voor vragen en aanmeldingen kun je me per e-mail bereiken op ton at openstate punt eu. Laat de oproep ook gerust zien aan anderen waarvan je denkt dat ze bij OSF passen.
Een paar weken geleden had ik een gesprek van een uur met Bart Ensink van Little Rocket over mijn werk en mijn bedrijf The Green Land. Dat gesprek is als zesde aflevering van de Datadriftig podcast nu te beluisteren. We ‘kwamen elkaar tegen’ in de interactie op een draadje op Mastodon in december. Little Rocket is een ebusiness bedrijf en maakt voor hun zakelijke klanten data bruikbaarder. Het is gevestigd in Enschede, dus bracht ik een bezoek aan de stad waar ik tot 6 jaar geleden woonde, en dook Enschede en de Universiteit Twente vaker op in het gesprek.
Today I heard the EU High Value Data list in its first iteration is finally decided upon. In September 2020 we submitted our advice on what data to include in the thematic areas of geographic data, statistics, mobility, company information, meteorology, earth observation and environment. Last week the Member States submitted their final yes/no vote, and the final text was approved. The EC will now finalise the text for publication, and it should be published before the end of the year. It will enter into force 20 days after publication and government data holders have 16 months until April/May 2024 to ensure compliance. It’s been a long path, and this first list could have been better concerning company information. Yet, when it comes to geographic data (addresses, buildings, land parcels, topography), meteorology and that same company information, it draws a line under two decades of discussion, court cases and studies to help dismantle the revenue model of charging at the point of use. Such charges are a threshold to market entry, and are generally lower than the tax revenue otherwise gained from the activities it’s a threshold to.
It’s easy to just move ahead and think about how this is not enough, what still needs doing, how to implement this etc. But it’s good to acknowledge that when I first started working on open government data in 2008 I heard the stories of those who had been at it for many years since well before the first PSI Directive was agreed in 2003. Some of those people have by now been retired for quite some time already, and I worked on it standing on their shoulders. The implementation act for EU high value data sets is a big step, even if in the field we thought it a no-brainer for decades already.
Are you aware of any open web work / uses / examples on/of the social graph? If so let me know!
The social graph is often a useful discovery tool for instance, and can be a navigation aid online. If you’ve ever looked at the blogroll of a blogger you follow, to find other bloggers to follow in your feed reader, you know what it’s like.
I’m interested in localised, fragmentary, starting from you/me, types of social graphs, out on the open web. I’m aware of some academic work in the early ’00s exploring and visualising the social graph of cross-blog conversations, and of course there used to be FOAF but mostly without interesting examples of usage attempts.
One thing that might be interesting is making RSS feed lists and blog rolls traversable. E.g. I have a blogroll that includes Peter who also publishes his blogroll. Both those blogrolls are in OPML, and OPML allows inclusion of external material formatted in OPML. I can include Peter’s OPML list in my OPML list. Then from my blogroll you are able to browse Peter’s blogroll. Or use a reader that actually includes it directly from its source. If Peter included my blogroll that way, and others that people publish than one could traverse across multiple includes. Etc.
Today a colleague at the Netherlands Space Office showed me a new Copernicus service, the ground motion service (EGMS). Quite an amazing data service to explore. Earlier I wrote about the European forest fire information service (EFFIS), and its use as a proxy for the fighting going on due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. EGMS is another service based on satellite remote sensing, here radar telemetry tracking the subsidence or rising of the ground. As far as I understand it can’t ‘see’ soft materials (peat land subsiding e.g.), only sees hard materials (solid ground, or buildings on softer grounds).
The images are quite amazing, and the data is provided right alongside it.
First an overview of northern Europe. Blue is rising ground, red is sinking ground. Sweden and Finland show rising ground, this is still the bounce back of the earth since the last ice age ended when the tremendous weight of glaciers was removed. At the tip of the arrow you see subsiding ground, this is the result of gas extraction in Groningen province.
Zooming in on Groningen province, here’s the data for a single house, subsiding 4 centimeters in the past 6 years. No wonder many homes are getting damaged in that area, both from subsidence as well as from the earthquakes that accompany it.
For comparison, here’s the data from the street I live on. It shows a subsidence of 6 millimeters in the past 6 years.
And here’s the same data as in the graph in the image above, but exported from the Copernicus services as an SVG, and pasted here as text.
Beautiful new Copernicus data service: ground motion monitoring. You can see the bounce back after the ice age in Scandinavia, the subsidence of houses in Groningen due to gas extraction. And my own home subsided 6mm since 2016.
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