Challenge
Local government decisions contain valuable information relevant to everyone in our society.
If we can exploit the full potential of these decisions, citizens will be informed quickly and in a targeted manner of decisions taken by their administration, entrepreneurs will know exactly what obligations they have to comply with and associations will have an overview of the subsidies for which they are eligible. From 2019, local authorities are obliged to publish their very numerous decisions (simple decisions and regulations) within 10 days, structuring the basic data according to the open standards defined by the Flemish government. This approach should greatly simplify the reuse of structured data for both administrative and policy purposes.
To this end, the Domestic Administration Agency wishes to use a state-of-the-art method based on 'Linked Data'. This ensures that information is immediately reusable and immediately integrates with search engines such as Google, platforms such as IBM Watson and digital assistants such as Siri and Cortana. To realise this vision, it is essential that the user can write modularly via an accessible environment.
Through the PIO project, the Domestic Administration Agency aims to encourage the market of e-gov players and local government suppliers to innovate and adapt their systems and tools to the needs for administrative data exchange.
It also plans to further develop the "Semantics@YourFingertips" platform as a reference system. This platform uses templates that describe linked data and guide the user in formatting documents. We opt to realise the software in the form of an Open Source project with the participation of entrepreneurs, academics, governments and citizens. The spill-over effect is that the building blocks developed can be deployed by innovative start-ups in the public and private sectors. The end result is a cost-efficient and high-quality collection of information as a catalyst for better services to citizens, entrepreneurs and organisations.
