oslo: open standards for linked organizations

OSLO: Open Standards for Linked OrganizationsLaurens De Vocht, Raf Buijle, Dieter De Paepe, Ruben Verborgh and Erik Mannens Mathias Van Compernolle, Peter Mechant, Ziggy Vanlishout and Björn De Vidts

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS AND INFORMATION SYSTEMSIMEC - IDLAB (FORMER IMINDS - MULTIMEDIA LAB)

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1. Introduction2. Political Context3. Semantic Interoperability4. Discussion5. Conclusions

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How canlocal and regional governments in Flanders (i) managethe structure and description (ii) of the data they publish (iii) so it leads toreusable data exchange (iv) ?

OSLO(i) political support and adoption(ii) semantic agreement(iii) once-only principle(iv) interoperability

OSLO: Background

Started February 2012, ended 2015

Result of public-private partnership initiated by V-ICT-OR

(non-profit Flemish ICT Organization)

Supported by wider community: local, regional and federal administrations

Brought in-line with ISA, EU initiative for interoperability (between EU

Member countries and regions)

OSLO: A Program

OSLO Program

Political Support and Adoption

Semantic Agreement

Once-onlyPrinciple Interoperability

OSLO Program: Supporting Common Interfaces

Citizens

Businesses

OtherGovernments

FederalGovernment

RegionalGovernment

LocalGovernment

OSLOProgram

Search for (linked) public or governmental data

Commoninterfaces

European Interoperability Framework (EIF)

Legal Interoperability

Organizational Interoperability

Semantic Interoperability

Technological Interoperability

Political Context

PromoteInteroperability

Citizens and businesses provide information only-once

Facilitate aggregation of information from different e-government

information systems and existing services to create new ones

Enable machine-readable reusable public service descriptions

OSLO Program: Goals

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Governmental Levels in Belgium (simplified model)

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Bottom-up and Top-down

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The local governments ‘promoters’ of OSLO created the necessary support at the local level

co-funded the initiativeinitial sponsors: Flemish ICT service providers; major cities and Informatie Vlaanderen

The promoters created a coalition of willing administrations at various government levels.

Working together with the ISA Program to get a more stable outcome fits in/corresponds to EU-level governancemore authoritative standards as result

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Contact Information: People and Organizations

Public Services

Localization

Focus on Thematic Domains

Domain Modeling: Process Overview

Semantic Agreement

Domains Entities + Relations + Attributes

Steering committee

Working groups

per domain

reporting

validation formalization

feedback

Semantic Agreement on Structure and Descriptions

People

Memberships

Localisation

Public Services

Businesses and Organizations

Semantic Agreement on Structure and Descriptions

Maximal Reuse of Existing Vocabularies

Core Public Service Vocabulary

OSLO Vocabulary Regorg

OrgVCARD Ontology

Core Location Vocabulary

FOAFVocabulary

Terms/MetadataVocabulary

Formalization and Implementation

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Result Where to find?

Specifications and Developer Documentation

http://purl.org/oslo

Knowledge Base(in Dutch, incl. policy and governance guidance)

https://www.v-ict-or.be/kenniscentrum/projectfiches/OSLO/OSLO-2

Mapping Guidelines https://github.com/v-ict-or/oslo-mapping-guidelines

RDF and XML serializations https://github.com/v-ict-or/oslo_xml_schemas

Namespace purl.org/oslo/ns/localgov#

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Pilot Projects

The ‘Shared catalog for local public administrations’ pilot [DeVocht2014] is a pilot on

contact information related to products and services disclosure between governments

and towards citizens.

The ‘Local Council Decisions as Linked Data’ [Buyle2016] demonstrates a method to

create a new (distributed) base registry for public mandates of local governments. .

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[DeVocht2014] De Vocht, L., Van Compernolle, M., Dimou, A., Colpaert, P., Verborgh, R., Mannens, E., Mechant, P., Van de Walle, R. 2014. Converging on semantics to ensure local government data reuse. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Semantics for Smarter Cities. CEUR-WS. 1280. 47–52.[Buyle2016] Buyle, R., Colpaert, P., Van Compernolle, M., Mechant, P., Volders, V., Verborgh, R., Mannens, E. 2016. Local Council Decisions as Linked Data: a proof of concept. In Proceedings of the 15th International Semantic Web Conference: Posters and Demos. CEUR-WS. 1690. Paper 71.

Characteristics

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Result Where to find?

Ownership Interest group of public servants active as IT practitioner at local government level organized as non-profit organization (V-ICT-OR).

Vocabulary Alignment Alignment with EU initiatives such as ISA and general Web recommendations by W3C

Adoption Public tenders on local levelEmbedding in policy on regional level

Adaptation Focus on commonalities rather than differences

Governance Self steering approach with one chair/facilitatorBusiness owners as invited experts

Findings

OSLO enforces the principle: ‘first clarify and then digitize’.

often there is a lack of political support to cope with this principle.

Bottom-up and top-down approach created the necessary political support.

OSLO was built on consensus, rather than on a legal framework.

unique situation where different government levels worked towards this consensus

could stimulate future uptakes of core data models by other administrations

Characteristics (prev. slide) could change to stimulate adoption at local and regional level:

the transfer of governance and lifecycle management of the program would be better at the higher level;

embedded in within a governmental public body or policy domain with power to ‘force’ the uptake instead of

in a non-profit organization that relies more on voluntary participation of municipalities.

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Conclusions OSLO Program covers political support and semantic agreement for e-government in Flanders: involving both public administrations and private partners on people, organizations, localization and public servicesincreased awarenessISA-based-methodology led to semantic convergence

Bottom-up organized working groups delivered a reusable formal specification

serialization of domain specific models.

The semantic process of OSLO showed/demonstrated that both ‘Political support’ and ‘Semantic Agreements’ are essential step stones to soften the existing information silosto make a shift to an open, interoperable and citizen-centric government.

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Laurens De VochtE [email protected]

@laurens_d_v

Raf Buijle1, Laurens De Vocht1, Mathias Van Compernolle2, Dieter De Paepe1, Ruben Verborgh1,Ziggy Vanlishout3, Björn De Vidts3, Peter Mechant2 and Erik Mannens1

1 {firstname.lastname}@ugent.be2 {firstname.lastname}@ugent.be

3 {firstname.lastname}@kb.vlaanderen.be

oslo: open standards for linked organizations

Government & Nonprofit