The end of summer found the ODECO consortium in beautiful Samos island for the fifth Training Week “Towards a Sustainable Open Data Ecosystem” of the project, organised by the University of the Aegean. 

Following another four successful and very adventurous weeks in fascinating Copenhagen (Denmark), captivating Zaragoza (Spain), enchanting Ascoli Piceno (Italy), and picturesque Leuven (Belgium), the project’s training activities are completed in one of the most historically important islands of the Aegean sea, habited since antiquity.

 

The training week was held in parallel with the 11th International Summer School on Digital Government – OpenGov2024, also organised annually by UAEGEAN, and this year having an open data and AI focus. The event hosted more than 60 internationally acclaimed professionals in the area of digital government, technologies, and data, and the participants had the chance to engage in several interactive sessions, workshops, master classes and particularly interesting lectures covering a wide spectrum of topics.

 

A couple of months before the event took place, ODECO project Task 4.2 had been running, dealing with the subject of how to stimulate non-government data holders to share open data using technical steering mechanisms. The involved researchers delved deeper into previously conducted work within ODECO in order to set the ground for this new task, aiming to propose technical solutions to the identified challenges. In a few words, the challenges identified pertained to i) better quality of open data, ii) better feedback mechanisms, iii) licensing and anonymisation, iv) interfaces and user interaction, as well as an improved use of open data to create value from sharing and re-use. The Greek Innovation Hub for Digital Governance DigiGOVInnoHUB, also represented at the event, provided the participants of OpenGov2024 with more insights around the presented challenges, emphasising the potential of open data to seek tangible and practical solutions.

 

The Open Data Ideathon
Given the challenges and research aim of the latest ODECO task, the Ideathon teams, guided by one experienced instructor each, went on creative mode, and, during the course of one day, proposed a set of solutions (or technical mechanisms) corresponding to the given challenges. The 8 teams of approximately 4-5 members each, presented and described their developed solution to the audience, and were later on evaluated by an Ideathon experts’ committee. The technical solutions presented by the teams involved the utilisation of new technologies (mainly AI or LLMs) as a means to facilitate the process of open data sharing for a variety of stakeholder data groups.

 

The 3 winner solutions of the Ideathon were:

• • 1st Place: HarmonIA – Augmenting semantic interoperability (by Ioanna, Umair, Nikos, Jos)

• • 2nd Place (draw): DLAE, A platform plugin to easily select and customize data licenses (by Anna, Orestis, Maria, Nikolaos) & TreeOfLicense, An open license decision support software (by Gennaro, Louise, Georgios, Silvia, Ramya)

• • 3rd Place: MindData: Intelligent validation of data on the Web (by Mohsan, Ashraf, Ioannis)

The Ideathon was held with success, producing insightful results from the multidisciplinary participating teams, and adding invaluable content to the project’s knowledge base and perspective.

Now ODECO’ers have returned home across Europe, but hopefully the summer memories and knowledge gained in Samos will accompany them while autumn is taking over, giving way to upcoming fascinating research and activities.

 

Next stop: Autumn-dressed Delft, the Netherlands, for an exciting video recording session of the ODECO Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)!

 

Authors:
Maria Ioanna Maratsi, University of the Aegean
Alejandra Celis Vargas, Aalborg University