OpenGovIntelligence Pilot Showcase: The Belgian Pilot
This is the third of a series of interviews with partners involved in the OpenGovIntelligence Project. The project is running six pilot projects on different aspects of improving public services with multidimensional statistical data. Here I speak with Tom Van Gulck, who works for the Flanders Environment Agency about the vision of the Belgian pilot and its focus audiences.
Hi Tom. Can you tell us a bit about your role in the project?
In Belgium, companies that want to emit polluting substances in the air or water have to have an environmental permit. Some of them are also obliged to report annually about the emissions of the previous year. In fact, data regarding the amount of substances per location has been collected since 2004. Since 2011, all of the data has been digital. The Belgian pilot is working to convert this data to triples so they have data for certain substances for the whole of Flanders. The vision of the pilot is twofold:
- to be able to find data by emission type or per municipality so the general public can ask for an overview of the substances in the area that they live.
- since the data is specific to each organisation, each organisation can benchmark themselves against other, similar, organisations in the aim to become as ‘green’ as their competitors.
Linked data allows Proxml (the Flemish pilot’s linked data technical partner) to link previously isolated data sources together. This shows how linked data can be used for data analysis.
What do you feel are the key aspects of your pilot in the project?
The public overview and the companies green standing are the two main aspects but the pilot could also be used for an evaluation tool for policies since the data has been collected over years and can be viewed as a time series.
What are the challenges associated with your pilot?
The main challenge is sparseness of datasets, which can make it hard for tools to be used.
Which audience do you want to reach with your pilot?
The Flemish pilot has three audiences: the government itself (from the community to local level); the general public and companies who may want to benchmark themselves.
How are you going to reach your target audience for the pilot?
In March 2017 we’re having an open data round table with three topics: Energy; Environment and Data. We’re expecting a mixture of government, private organisations and NGO’s to attend. In the environmental part of it I’m going to present the proof of concept for the datasets and focus on interfaces for the target audiences to use. The next step will be to provide tools to easily query the data. This round table is in addition to the presentations we’ve already had between ourselves and other divisions of the Flemish government.
How are you going to ensure user engagement?
We’ll be using a case by case method to engage users with the linked data approach, which has been shown to work. The general public is harder to reach. Currently, we’re planning to provide tools on the website that they can use and publish the metadata for the datasets on the Flemish open data portal.
