The EU Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT-PSP) aims to stimulate wider uptake of innovative ICT-based services that expand the exploitation of digital content across Europe for use by citizens, governments and businesses. The focus of the programme is on new public interest services addressing a range of challenges facing EU society by helping to overcome hurdles, such as: lack of data harmonisation, services interoperability and market fragmentation. The ENERGIC OD Project falls within ICT PSP Work Programme 2013 objective dealing with Open Data, where public sector information represents a major digital content resource for innovative applications and services. 

 

One of the programme objectives supports target outcomes in the realm of Geographic Information (GI) - an important component of Public Sector Information. 

 

GI is both a primary source of public sector data and an important means for creating innovative services, providing a motor for economic growth through the creation of innovative information products and services that can be further enhanced and deployed in multiple sectors. The pilot projects to be funded in this objective are asked to stimulate innovation and business activities around public GI data, including both national and pan-European datasets, and solutions providing enhanced location-based services. 

 

The selected projects are to focus on developing Virtual Hubs (VH) that facilitate the use of freely available open geographic data from different sources for the creation of innovative applications and services. 

 

The VHs provide concrete experiments that identify and provide solutions for real world problems or address existing market opportunities. 

 

The pilots should also explore use of crowdsourced geodata (VGI - Volunteered Geographic Information) and address issues relating to use of data generated in real-time and potentially in large volumes. 

 

Successful pilot applications are expected to:

- build on state-of-the-art technologies and provide detail on the innovations they can bring to the marketplace,

- lead to an easier discoverability and use of GI made available for use in innovative applications and services that can integrate datasets from multiple sources,

- be validated and tested by relevant user communities, who should be involved in the pilots as much as possible,

- increase exploitation opportunities for open GI data and development of innovative services,

- facilitate market entry for new companies, and

- explore incentives and policy issues relating to VGI, privacy, IPR and related regulatory issues.

 

The ENERGIC OD Project satisfies all of these objectives and targets by adopting an information broker architectural approach, designed and developed in recent research activities and implemented via a number of pilot applications, each in different sectors of public interest. In this approach, the broker components perform the interoperability actions required to interconnect heterogeneous systems, freeing the new application developer from needing a higher level of expertise in connecting datasets. ENERGIC OD will deploy a set of Virtual Hubs (VH) by integrating an existing broker framework with other selected technologies to provide users with a single point of access to geospatial datasets provided by new or existing platforms and infrastructures, including INSPIRE-compliant systems and GMES/Copernicus services.

 

This innovative approach will greatly facilitate the development of new and multidisciplinary applications based on the full exploitation of (open) GI, hence stimulating innovation and business activities.