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Open Data for Science and Society
Forward-Looking, Visionary Approaches for Public Sector Information Sharing and Utilisation
AN INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
Open data provide an unprecedented opportunity for societies to move towards transparency, evidence-based decisions, enhanced cohesion, public engagement and trust. Public sector information may be offered as ”open data” in many forms and through different media: from simple datasets describing traffic or unemployment, to web services linking and mashing information from different sources, to interactive visualization of complex phenomena, to citizen-based data gathering and transmission. This way, new information is made available to scientists, citizens and enterprises for developing and offering value-adding services, thus forming a supply chain around publicly available open data.
In this context, the ENGAGE project (http://www.engage-project.eu ), funded by the European Commission under the e-Infrastructures Programme, aims at the deployment and use of an advanced service infrastructure, incorporating distributed and diverse public sector information resources as well as data curation, semantic annotation and visualisation tools, capable of supporting scientific collaboration and governance-related research from multi-disciplinary scientific communities, while also empowering the deployment of open governmental data towards citizens.
Objectives of the Call:
With this call for contributions, ENGAGE aims to attract high-quality innovative contributions, in the form of short papers that depict sound positions and views for advancing the provision, usage and final utilization of open data by scientists of all scientific domains, citizens and businesses. Topics of this call include but are not fully limited to the following:
· Justification of requirements for public sector information, orienting from any scientific domain
· Examples and best practices of open data utilization for scientific purposes
· Visionary ideas on open data utilization within society
· Metadata schemas for open and linked data management
· Methods and tools for open data acquisition, curation, management and publication
· Methods and tools for integrating and combining open data from distributed heterogeneous sources
· Methods and tools for combining linked open data with in-house or open structured information systems in the ‘deep web’
· Information systems and services for open data gathering and provision
· New approaches for public sector information visualization
· Collaborative governance approaches involving the use of open data
· Open data and citizen participation in information gathering / crowdsourcing
· New governance and business models for open data
· Legal provisions and open issues at national and European level, regarding re-use of governmental data
· International cooperation in the field of open and linked data
Excellent contributors should provide multi-disciplinary approaches, possibly combining information science with social sciences, management, finance, engineering or law, to allow uptake of open data by diverse scientific domains, for modeling or solving complex societal problems.
Award Scheme:
Up to 5 authors of the best papers submitted under this call will be invited to join the ENGAGE Experts Scientific Committee. Members of this committee have a key role in providing their expertise in specific research areas, in participating in the workshops that will be conducted during the project, and in presenting their comments and feedback to the project deliverables.
Beside the prestige and the opportunity to shape the EU research agenda on Open Data, each member of the Expert Scientific Committee will receive a sum of 2,500 EUR to fund participation in the activities of the project.
Submission Guidelines:
All submissions must be between 2,000 and 3,000 words, following the LNCS format: http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/word.zip?SGWID=0-0-45-72919-0
Submissions by more than one author are welcome; however only the coordinating author (as indicated in the submission) of the selected paper will be invited to join the ENGAGE Expert Scientific Committee.
Please submit your contribution via e-mail to contact@engage-project.eu together with a short biography of 150 words for each of the authors. All selected contributions will be published in the ENGAGE website after the announcement of results.
Important Dates:
Deadline for submission of position papers: 15th March 2012
Announcement of results and best papers: 15th April 2012
CFC Editing and Review Committee
Yannis Charalabidis, University of Aegean, Greece
Matthias Fluegge, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany
Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Keith Jeffery, Science and Technology Facility Council, UK
Nikos Houssos, EuroCRIS, The Netherlands
Fotis Karayannis, Microsoft Innovation Centre, Greece
Euripidis Loukis, University of Aegean, Greece
Spyros Mouzakitis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
John Psarras, National Technical University of Athens (coordinator), Greece
Antonis Ramfos, Intrasoft International, Belgium
Avi Yaeli, IBM Research Haifa, Israel
Anneke Zuiderwijk, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
