Open Belgium 2021: We reuse LOD and open it up Your turn to build it

for this session for the i think for the since uh since 19 no no it's not not right since 2015 i think we uh already spoke to you about um alberto de la and last year we uh spoke about of course since this is open belgium the importance of data open data and how we work together with the community to make sure we have relevant solutions for citizens and i'm not sure if you remember because it was the last um event i think before we went to into lockdown um and we noticed how important uh our project was because all of a sudden a lot of uh decisions um were made that we haven't heard of before like where uh having to wear a face mask was all of a sudden the new normal um curfews uh and even uh maximum amounts of people that can be in a certain area a whole wide world of new kind of decisions that we we needed to know about of course other governments needed to know what was decided but also we as a civilian we wanted to know and companies also needed to know what the rules the new rules were um and the question always is can uh i access the information how can i make sure that i as a citizen or my fellow citizens know what to do can we create a solution that makes sure that everyone knows the rules and since we have a project that builds an ecosystem based on standards and linked open data we can say yes i could say yes we can yes you can we even have a deadline this year by june 2021 so this year local authorities will publish all of their decisions as linked open data it will make data sharing easier as you all know and a lot of local governments are already have started so that means that they are making their decisions available uh based on the linked open data standard they even have to publish it as linked open data it's a rule and they have a lot of solutions to do so so we are helping them with a lot editor so an lod editor text editor you i think you lost edition you could uh even have a go with it and and try to create your own uh text editor uh and your own decisions in it we have a few software vendors that already embed our editor in their tool and there are also a few local software suppliers that embedded the the linked open data standard in their publishing module so that local governments can publish their decisions um the last year we spent a lot of time on info sessions testing support giving them feedback even giving them money to make sure that everyone is on board and it pays off um so we already have 6 56 56 yes uh percent of all the local governments that publish their decisions as linked upon data and it's an increase of uh more than 20 i think 26 percent since uh last summer so it may cost us a lot of uh patience and uh effort but we see it works um and what does it mean is that all of the information on um local decisions like agendas uh the decision themselves uh the meeting minutes that they are available uh on the local websites so we already did a test on google if you look for for local decisions it is easier nowadays to find the local decisions so if you want to look for something of your own local government you'll probably find it uh on the local websites also um but we also as a government we also harvest the information and put it in our own uh data hive catherine will show you later how it looks like of course you could also look for the mandates uh and the um lady even of the local governments it's also a database you can search for what we also do is simplify the communication between governments and and and higher authorities like flanders um it is kind of uh difficult for uh flaunters to look at all of the 300 local governments and know what to decide upon especially uh with kovit knowing what the the rules were not only citizens but also as flanders to to to make sure that every decision is is uh not only legal but is is in sync with each other that wasn't easy so we we did we could fall back on the database we already had to make sure we have insights in what is going on at the local level so we have a basilar databank a database of local decisions where you could full text search actually what was decided upon at the local level so for example when we uh looked for face face mask mask i can even show you if you want i could show you oh but i can't show you because or okay i can't show you because our network is down at flanders so i will show you maybe later on um and you can see the presentation sorry so if you look for face mask mod mask in dutch in our decision database you could find i think almost 2 000 decisions on montmasker so that means that uh yeah flanders can look at all of these decisions and make sure that they're legal and uh in sync with each other with higher legislation for example um we make sure that we we share this information with other departments in flanders so that local governments don't have to copy the information to other departments over and over again so we want to uh make sure that citizens can be informed and can be involved in a better way we we have a goal by 23 we want to make sure that there are tools so we can do so uh by sharing the data we have and working together with all of you with the community this is our minister parsons he also believes that the project we have here helps in involving citizens in the local decision-making um and he already answered in the flemish parliament on questions uh about citizen inform involvement so he uh mentioned that he really would like uh 2023 to be uh the moment we have better solutions to make sure that we can involve citizens when we are doing a project we have a kind of agile way to make sure that we have the right solution we identified a problem we research a lot of possibilities how can we tackle this problem we build a project and then we test i'm going to hide this the assumptions we made earlier and we are trying to learn uh from uh doing and testing our products and what we built that's that is why we where we are now so we are asking you the community to test what we made and we are asking you to influence the future i uh explained so um that we want to involve and inform the the the citizens and we want you to challenge us we want you to take the data we have and do something with it so that local governments can be motivated to be even more transparent it's important for them to see that people are interested in the data in the local decisions so they know that the the change they have to make in order to to to to publish the data as linked upon data um that it is it has value um we also want you to uh inspire the the policymakers to invest in in in in data and open data and especially in in linked open data so if you have any idea from uh on how to use the data on decisions what would you do and what data would you want we are we want to challenge you to pitch an idea a concept a design maybe even a working application uh in three weeks so we made a prototype kathleen will show you and we want you to play with the data and make sure you have some kind of idea kathleen will now show you what data we have right now we usually have more general information on meeting minutes agendas decisions and those who make the decisions how we put it in a decision data that catherine will show you know how to use it okay i will take over the screen uh good morning all before we start with the exploration of the data decision hive um i will still uh repeat what we we have in it uh veronica mentioned it uh already we have um data about um mandates they are coming out from the mandate and data bank we have data about management functions this is coming from the leading here in the data bank those two data sets are mostly complete we have it from all um municipalities and then the data we're today presenting to you about the decisions uh we have on this moment from five um municipalities because we are still trying to uh to help them to do to do it uh good because you have to know they are already obliged to do it from january um 2019 but they are in a way to to start and it takes some time and um municipality of liverhood for example they have started in october to publish their first uh not to learn as linked open data how can you see that i will go back a step here you have the city council and on the bottom and they have three uh documents that are published as linked open an agenda a list with decisions and meeting minutes the meeting minutes are the most extensive documents i will open it there you have who is attending to the meeting you have the items on the agenda and what is decided so you have the decision itself that is completed in the lists you have only the items and the decision that is made about it not the whole text and the agenda is only the agenda items with sometimes a description so and a meeting like this they are having once a month and mostly not in december or not in feb february so from october till now we have only uh four documents already not the meeting minutes of the last uh one who was held in uh february because they are published end of march after the next meeting so this to explain how the process is working and it takes some time to have the um complete meeting minutes um what's interesting before you uh start to explore uh the um in that decision that i have is to watch the data model and that will help you to know what you can uh find which items you can use to uh write the the queries and you can use the entities relationships but uh i'm not technical and i learn it by doing so i will explore together with you the uh data so here we have a first query we are going to look um how many uh meetings are in this uh decision data hive so i used here a query who is asking for slurs sitting what is um having this uh type so i have on this moment 23 meeting uh meetings in the um in the sparkle endpoints um which means that for the agenda and the list of decisions and the meeting minutes they are all uh put together in one meeting so for one meeting you can find three types of uh information let's go step further in who are the boards who are uh holding the meeting uh that's something else you can do and then i i hear i ask for the uri so i uh receive the uri and here you have the 23 meetings with their meeting boards and i can explore it further when i click on it i can see one oh here it's the college of danza uh that has made uh some decisions here there are other ways to ask information so perhaps it's more interesting to to explore something where we have several meeting minutes so i want to know which boards has uh more than one meeting or how many meetings have uh each board we are having in the data sets so i receive here the answer the most are having one in it for the moment i have here a board with four meeting minutes let's explore this further i can choose to to copy the link here and then [Music] go for another query it was already prepared so i will do it here i have four um meeting minutes and just shortly to to show how you can search in it let's go uh further and look at the data uh itself you saw the website of leaving him and normally seen it's a meeting minute of leaving him i have here opened and you see it here on the uri um for this municipality there is a difference between the uri and the your the url they use and the uri is not the referenceable on this moment when i click on the uri you will have an an error um message um [Music] this is uh also tragic a project we are working to and they are going step by step and one of in one of the following uh new versions of their software it will be uh the referenceable there are already a software houses who can make the uri be referenceable although we have a lot of information already from this meeting i go to the bottom because there we have uh the general information you can find here the date of the meeting it was the 27th of january when it started at eight o'clock started at time eight o'clock ended at nine o'clock the location and this times is now mostly a digital meeting and before you found their council uh room or something like that sometimes now it's also cultural centrum where they are meeting what can you find also um the meeting has a president and i see the uri of the president when i click on it i will do it in another screen or another tab you have the information about the president he is started at the 2nd of january in 2019 and he holds mandates he has uh memberships and that's about the fraxi you can find there but we want to know who the person is then i can go here to especially alias fun then i get to know the person and it's here going about nicolas pinal this um data we are getting from the mandaton data bank so the link who is used here you can find it also in the mandaton data bank let's go back to our meeting minutes what we have also we have the amazing bastard those are the persons who are from the beginning at the meeting um it works the same way you can also find the mandates um [Music] here you see the um board with uh holding uh a meeting and i showed it before for a dancer here you can see it's the him interrupt leave him and also the posts who are forming the boards can you find in here so let's go further i will scroll to the to the top again here you see all uh atom knees then here we start with the agenda items i will pick here one let's try this one so then you can see um what information we have about an agenda item okay my internet is hanging i'll try it again it was working this morning always risky to have a live dinner yes okay pick another one perhaps yes here i have it it was a little uh slow so about the agenda item i'm not kidding you here it's about an agenda um i can go to the subject of the agenda and then you see who is the attendee at the agenda item because someone can leave or can um start later at a meeting or in some cases he may not be uh attending uh the discussion uh on an agenda item because he's involved in the agenda uh discussion um so the attendees we have here when we go follow we have again the before um interesting here is you can see how people have voted on the agenda uh points and let's open this it will stay in the same tab and okay i missed no problem when i go back so when you take this one you uh are coming to the definition of what is if stemming to see the data you take the one at the right uh column so what you know uh what's about uh what's to find about the um voting you can see who has voted uh yeah is forced under uh from its uh the item or who is uh oh there were only people who are yes we are going to do that it's still loading here i don't think there were the standards it's uh it's big now i have no idea i will wait until he has uh loaded the other page so because he's also counting how many people uh have voted uh yes or um how many people who were uh against it and so you can see um what's the the amount it's a public stemming and it's because uh this the voting is public you uh can uh know um how every um counselor has voted there are also uh votings who are yeah secret as we know it as we yeah as we know it um and then uh you don't you do not know how every uh person has uh has faulted there are no um standards here everyone was uh uh had said uh yes so we see here 924 standards there's there were 29 persons uh in the council room we do not know yet on what they have voted so we are going back because we want to know what were they voting about and then normally it's this one where i can see uh what they have discussed it was in the from the college here you can see also what's the content of the decision and what's the motivation to take the decision it's a long motivation for this moment you find the decision in in one text block in the software houses or the tools that are uh already further in in the data model they are uh if they can split up uh from article and from this on this moment we do not have yet someone who is uh splitting up in articles because it takes some time to to have changes to the software tools well this is what i wanted to show you what we have in our data uh hive i will not go too far in it so you can explore it by yourself on our website you have um other kind of uh queries so i i say let's uh explore and try to do some things we are going to um add some more uh documents and there are municipalities who are starting in a few days so uh by the end of the week you will find a little more data available so i give back the word to uh veronique thank you catherine um i'm not sure i'm not sharing my screamer screen and see just try to fix that um i still have to click on screen screen sharing yes thank you for explaining um our decision data i tried to show you our database of decisions earlier i managed to get in there so i can show you how we could search for mont's mask for example i will first tell you we have 68. thousand more than eight eighty six thousand this uh documents in our database and if i go for montmasker it will show us uh that there are 1400 decisions on moscow um and like catherine showed us you can click on them and look for link decisions on there like this we go to the website of the local government and then we can see that there was decision decision by the mayor when and where to wear a mouth mask um if we then go to the future what we would like to to to have is is solutions where we can um uh not only look for the mouth masks but that you also can see a list of of uh places where you have to wear the mouth mask uh like this these are the streets in the center of a city for example where we have to wear it it's like that's almost everywhere i think and that you can click on the streets and see what was decided upon that treats earlier where mouth mask was was mentioned in the decision and even what we would like is some kind of link to measurements on how busy it is so you can have some kind of alert that sometimes the rule says you have to wear a mouth mask when it's busy so it would be nice that you also get some kind of alert on that uh so that's what is what we envision in the future um uh in in making tools possible where we can integrate the the informational decisions in applications that are close to citizens so i would invite you to explore our data and dream with us we will launch a website on this the challenge i think in a few um art or me should uh i should mention it he is already available ah is already available so you just go to open belgium yes click on that and see what the challenge is all about um so let's go what would you do with it um that's our challenge for you and i think that was our talk that concludes that and we are open for questions i already saw some questions you can find a small summary in the shared notes yes i did see someone asking about [Music] vegan roads it's difficult to see these things in uh i'm looking for the notes yes so if i i do remember correctly uh local uh governments have to have some register on um yeah um defining new roads and and adaptions to uh the rules the the the road and they also have to uh um send it to uh the central uh database um um we are working on that actually that was maybe the question um we are doing this in steps like we do with with all of the things we we try to implements i could maybe show you how it is now mentioned in our registry or database of decisions because we have a we are working with [Music] movi on this subject where local governments can publish their decisions on the roads as link data and we can harvest them automatically that doesn't mean that we already can have a lot on his segment but that would be the future actually so the first step is making sure that we know about the decisions and that it doesn't cost a lot of uh effort for the local governments i was going to for um [Music] plan i could show you that we already have them in our database i was trying to i lost my mouse thing too many screens before me here it is so uh we have for example no tulla from like this you see this is still in a not linked non-linked way so we still have a pdf but you can see that we we are finding that this is this is the decisions on um roads if i go for roiland we can see that we can find a decision on uh the royal end and next to the roads um [Music] but the idea is that we can have lots in the decisions later on so that we also can have the information on the actual his web segment i'm not sure how to put that in english so i'll just have to go for the dutch word is that an answer to the question i'm trying to see the chat okay are there still some other questions i need to address i assume that given that there's at least some action on the server that some people are are uh thinking of various solutions either feel free to bring them up or maybe we should kind of uh indicate what the broadness of solutions are that would be interesting for the challenge right yes because what we we want to test whether or not our solution for giving you the data is is okay and in general uh whether or not we can use this way of working uh in order to involve citizens more in the future so it's kind of a different levels where we are trying to get feedback uh on how to move forward um so that means that anything with respect to that a challenge like this data is uh is useful um and i would like to extend it with the following data it would be nice if we'd have that or based on this i could build an application or i've i've toyed with it i've built i built a few queries and and i now have the following information and it's it's interesting um anything that has to do with the data or extending this data what you can do with it is super useful and very very very welcome and then we'll figure out how we uh how we get the best information out of that um or or the the the quote unquote best ideas but that's mega weird of course um so anything in that regard uh either now or later we'd love to hear from it we'd love to hear about it and from you right and i think on that page uh you'll find a place to uh join a challenge how to contact us if you have extra questions and reach us um if you've brought down the sparkle endpoint how to make sure that we bring it back up um so feel free to ask silly questions to it it's all fine we have a few questions we have is the party affiliation also available on the members of the city council for example yes yes it is normally you can find it [Music] uh via the relationship lit match up i was looking it up uh i will post it in the in the chat yeah it's in the it's not always the same of the of the party because um [Music] the fraction can be some yeah uh going together from several parties um so it's not completely the same you could you you could see it as on on which list someone is um it's um electric yes and since locally there are a lot of local lists that are not having a national party behind them um yeah we sometimes have really exotic names uh local local level but you can know on which list someone is being um yes if the municipalities have filled it and we asked for it but not all of them are doing it but you are going to find a lot of it i try to find a link and i will post an example yes and then jean is asking what technology do you use to build the user interface yeah i'm also typing it um so i think the most interesting is that uh you can actually query either the sparkle endpoint or any backend services using a restful endpoint and it'll yield you back json so you can send out sparkle queries and you get back jason um and so what we use we use semantic works to have some micro services that yield us some basic information about the triples and that lists us the human readable names of these of these triples but i suppose it's a more interesting thing is that you can send um sparkle queries directly as json if it should be that you hit course errors um then we can just enable it so you can use it directly at the same endpoints so you can use that sparkling point do make sure that you can configure it somewhere in your application maybe because it might be that so this database you can bring it down it's all fine for open belton um but there's other databases that we intend to have live for a longer period of time if you can then replace it then you can keep your app up and running because technically speaking these apis the semantic model is fixed so that should stay running for years what's that announcer john you can use your microphone now if you like and if you'd like to discuss further feel free to contact and either chat or mail or meeting you can see that some of you are ready for uh posting some ideas very good does everyone understand what the what what what they have to do to participate in the challenge that may also be uh something that maybe we should repeat it not sure whether or not it's on here how to propose your idea you can find it on the website you have to send in your proposal or latest uh at the latest on 20 20 22nd of march um in an extended elevator pitch and zap is already going wild on on my teeth all right any more questions quiet that either means people are typing very very rapidly or uh we'll receive further questions maybe over email or ideas or uh but i see some vibe in the chat which is uh encouraging and some ideas i mean with actual things that you already can see that's super rad thank you all right i think we can conclude on time this was the first session i hope you have a blast in searching for ideas and sending us your um yeah your thank you very much veronique and catherine as well i will quickly copy paste the shared notes into the public chat so they are also saved on the recording because that's not the case if they are in the shared notes so you will see a lot of text there voila um yes and if there are no further questions then i think we can conclude this call i will stop recording in any case you